This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Media

  • That video from the USS Enterprise

    I’ve been reading about this supposedly “raunchy” video that the former XO and current commander (CPT Owen Honors) of the USS Enterprise made while the crew was finishing their 2007 cruise. From everything I’ve read, I was expecting something really disgusting. Our reader Matt sent me the video and I’ll tell you, I’m shocked.

    Here’s how CNN described it;

    Honors is shown cursing along with other members of his staff in an attempt to demonstrate humor, according to videos. There are also anti-gay slurs, simulated sex acts, and what appear to be two female sailors in a shower together.

    Sounds pretty bad, huh? Well, here’s the video. You really owe it to yourself to watch the whole 12 minutes;

    This is the tamest thing I could have expected. Anyone who gets their balls in a uproar over this bit of sophomoric behavior is a complete pussy. Yeah, OK, they used the F-bomb and they made some toilet jokes and a guy beating off to his maintenance manual is kind of funny, but I guess civilian journalists have a different idea of what is funny than real people.

    The Huffington Post calls Honors the “Mastermind” behind the video. Mastermind. Jeez. The Virginia Pilot quotes a shipmember;

    “They were the XO’s project,” said one former Enterprise sailor, a ship video-grapher who on one occasion was asked to help in the filming. “He was the one coming up with scripts and the jokes. He was the one planning it.”

    The Pilot continues with a description of the “mastermind’s” video;

    In one scene, two female Navy sailors stand in a shower stall aboard the aircraft carrier, pretending to wash each other. They joke about how they should get six minutes under the water instead of the mandated three.

    In other skits, sailors parade in drag, use anti-gay slurs, and simulate masturbation and a rectal exam. Another scene implies that an officer is having sex in his stateroom with a donkey.

    Really. Show me something anti-gay. The women in the shower were clothed and willing participants. And, oh, there’s also a scene with two guys in the shower soaping each other up. In drag? A guy runs through a scene with a bikini top. Who among us hasn’t used the “sex with a donkey” joke?

    If what I saw is the entire video, I’d say “so fucking what?” This is the kind of nit-picking bullshit that continues to keep the military arms’ length from civilians. Of course, CNN and the Virginia Pilot hopes this rises to the level of the Tailhook Scandal, but it’s not even close. Most of the civilian dimwits won’t even see the video, but they’ll still complain about shit they’ve never seen…like they always do. Ignorant but vocal.

    The Navy’s investigation should have ended twelve minutes after it began. But it won’t.

    And, oh, Honors is a homeboy from Syracuse and we ain’t right.

  • Speculation as evidence

    The Guardian regurgitates baseless accusations against the US military in an article entitled “Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US assault“. The article claims that “researchers”, who are never named by the Guardian, have linked US weapons to birth defects in Fallujah’s children. Completely, unfounded, even in the article;

    “We suspect that the population is chronically exposed to an environmental agent,” said one of the report’s authors, environmental toxicologist Mozhgan Savabieasfahani. “We don’t know what that environmental factor is, but we are doing more tests to find out.”

    Yeah, “we don’t know what caused the defects, but we’re pretty sure it’s the Americans”. They’ve had nearly seven years “to find out” and they’re empty-handed. Of course, they love to blame depleted uranium;

    The findings are likely to prompt further speculation that the defects were caused by depleted uranium rounds, which were heavily used in two large battles in the city in April and November 2004. The rounds, which contain ionising radiation, are a core component of the armouries of numerous militaries and militias.

    Depleted uranium is used primarily as an anti-armor weapon. How many tanks did al Qaeda have in Falujah? The only reason that depleted uranium is useful as weapon is because it’s density allows it to punch a hole in armor at a very speed. You can find all kinds of misinformation about depleted uranium from the anti-war crowd and conspiracy nuts who tell us that we’re disposing of our nuclear waste with the DU darts – a fairly expensive endeavor of dispsing a few ounces of uranium at a shot.

    However, no evidence has yet been established that proves this, and some researchers instead claim that depleted uranium has been demonstrably proven not to be a contaminant.

    So, I wonder why the Guardian even mentioned this research-less research. Well, beyond the headline, of course.

  • WaPo’s admiration for Mexican gun sales

    I’ve written twice about the Washington Post’s series of articles on gun dealers in the US. In October, they wrote about gun dealers in the DC area and earlier this month about guns that make their way to Mexico. In each article, the reader can just feel that there’s another shoe to drop on the subject.

    Well, the shoe dropped today when the Washington Post wrote about Mexico’s only gun shop;

    To go shopping for a gun in Mexico, customers must come to Mexico City – even if they live 1,300 miles away in Ciudad Juarez. To gain entry to the store, which is on a secure military base, customers must present valid identification, pass through a metal detector, yield to the security wand and surrender cellphones and cameras.

    To buy a gun, clients must submit references and prove that their income is honestly earned, that their record is free of criminal charges and that their military obligations, if any, have been fulfilled with honor. They are fingerprinted and photographed. Finally, if judged worthy of owning a small-caliber weapon to protect home and hearth, they are allowed to buy just one. And a box of bullets.

    Mexico has some of the toughest gun-control laws in the world, a matter of pride for the nation’s citizens.

    Yeah, I’m pretty sure that Mexican citizens are proud that they have to be treated like a criminal until they prove themselves innocent to buy a single gun. I’m pretty sure that they don’t get to pick the gun they buy either.

    So now we get a glimpse of the gun control we can have if the regulations are suited for the Washington Post.

    More than 6,600 federally licensed firearm dealers operate on the U.S. side of the border. At least 14 million guns are thought to have been sold in the United States last year, according to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. But no one knows the exact number.

    Cryin’-ass shame ain’t it?

    Members of the military, police and security firms are exempt from the handgun-control law that applies to the general public. If a business owner wants a gun to protect his cantina or muffler shop, he can apply for a permit. A different permit is required to transport the weapon from one place to another. The paperwork for the latter takes a couple of weeks.

    “In most cases, we suggest hiring a private security company, and, to refrain from the use of a weapon, we invite people to use other security mechanisms,” Manzano said

    Yeah, having all of the guns in the hands of the police and military has worked out so well for the Mexicans hasn’t it? Now, only civilians are getting gunned down along the frontier with the US – the unarmed public bears the brunt of the drug war.

  • Rumor Doctor’s top ten diagnosis of 2010

    Our newest fan, Jeff Schogol, known as the Rumor Doctor at Stars & Stripes sends us a link to his top ten rumor busters of 2010. It includes “Is Taylor Swift a Chinese spy”, the rumor that Air Force recruits get inoculations with square needles, and the real origin of that red “blood” stripe Marines wear on their trousers.

  • NYT: cut our military during this war

    In the New York Times this weekend was an opinion piece written by a journalist Nicholas Kristof who advocates cutting military spending while we’re engaged in a war beyond our borders. Now I read Mr. Kristof’s biography and I don’t see a thing that qualifies him to make such a statement…well, other than the fact that he’s a journalist, spent his whole adult life as a journalist as so he thinks he knows every thing there is to know about…well…everything. Now he wants to be heard on our global strategy;

    • The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.

    And the problem is? I wonder if Mr. Kristof has noticed that the rest of the world is more than hesitant to use their military. While Serbs murdered Bosnians, the world stood around with their hands in their pockets. While hundreds of thousands of Africans died, the world stood by and watched. While terrorists attack in almost every European country, they’re resistant to send their own military to where the terrorists are being trained.

    • The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?

    You do realize that we’ve drawn down our forces substantially in Europe right? It should also be noted that much of the underlying infrastructure in our Europe-based force supports operations in the Middle East. And, yes Russia is becoming a bigger threat to Europe every day.

    • The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.

    Having a top secret clearance doesn’t make someone a member of the intelligence community. Sometimes just being in the same grid square as mundane, routine classified information requires a clearance. You’d think someone as worldly as Mr. Kristoff would know that. But he probably does and he wants to scare the folks who don’t.

    • The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

    Hmmm. I wonder why a high tech war which depends on gee-whiz gadgets would cost more than every war we ever fought with cap and ball weapons while we were mounted atop horses?

    “Republicans think banging the war drums wins them votes, and Democrats think if they don’t chime in, they’ll lose votes,” said Andrew Bacevich, an ex-military officer who now is a historian at Boston University.

    Hardly, dimbulbs two. it’s not Republicans who beating war drums. It’s people like Ahmadinejad and Il who beat war drums. Do we want to be unprepared when they finally make their move?

    Let me be clear: I’m a believer in a robust military, which is essential for backing up diplomacy. But the implication is that we need a balanced tool chest of diplomatic and military tools alike. Instead, we have a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service — and that’s preposterous.

    Yeah, because we’ve seen how well the “foreign service” has performed over the last hundred years or so. Even before we had a large standing army. Kristoff is probably home right now Windexing his Rhodes scholar scroll, so proud of how he stood up for an intellectual foreign policy in favor of a brutish military solution to all of our problems. But, he neglected to take into account that we’re not talking about existing in a civilized world like when diplomacy actually worked in the mid-19th century in Europe briefly. Diplomacy actually caused the problems with Iran and North Korea. Diplomacy caused the Iraq War.

  • IVAW in your hometown

    Yesterday, a young soldier home on leave to his hometown for the holiday season found this article in his local newspaper;

    Iraq War veterans Aaron Hughes of Chicago, Scott Kimble of Champaign, and Brock McIntosh of Normal spoke about Operation Recovery, which opposes sending troops with PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury, and Military Sexual Trauma back into battle. Operation Recovery insists that traumatized veterans have the right to heal.

    “I think it’s morally abhorrent to send mentally traumatized soldiers back to battle where they use heavy weapons and armor,” McIntosh said. “Many of these soldiers are on psychotropic drugs and are a danger to themselves, to fellow soldiers and everyone else.”

    Twenty percent of troops deployed repeatedly have PTSD, Hughes said. Suicide rates among active-duty troops are twice as high as that of the civilian population, and veterans with PTSD are six times more likely to attempt suicide, according to the IVAW.

    Hughes said that Military Sexual Trauma is a major problem for female soldiers, one third of them suffering sexual assault. Ninety percent of women soldiers seeking help from the Veterans Administration report sexual assault from fellow soldiers, he said.

    “Women have to go to their commander to prove their case first,” Hughes explained, and often their complaints are dismissed. “Women are expected to return and serve with the same soldiers who assaulted them,” he said. The actual number of cases of MST is difficult to verify, as many sexual assaults go unreported. According to a 2004 study cited by the Service Women’s Action Network, 71 percent of women veterans seeking help from the VA had been sexually assaulted.

    The young trooper, after writing to Blackfive (who forwarded the email to us) fired off this letter to the author of the article;
    (more…)

  • Forget all of that other stuff you’ve done

    All of that war-fighting you’ve done…all of that showing up when your country called and the rest of the men your age cowered in their Basket Weaving 101 class. When you volunteered and your peers scooted off to Canada. When your peers were spitting on you and you didn’t punch their stupid faces in. When you took off your uniform and quietly went on with your life. While you sat in the classroom without throttling that idiot, lying professor. While Hollywood portrayed you as a hair-trigger nut job.

    Going off to war while the New York Times did their level best to get you killed and demeaned your service.

    Finally, you’ve done something honorable. Thanks for noticing, New York Times. We’re here for all of your social experiments.

    I wonder if the New York Times remembers who was the President and which party ran both houses of Congress in 1993. Or are they just hoping that we forgot?

  • Bush tax rates become “Landmark tax bill”

    Those extreme tax cuts of nearly a decade ago? Well, they’ve become a “Landmark Tax Bill” in the pages of the Washington Post when President Obama signs his name to them.

    As recently as August, Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post said;

    A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year — and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation’s millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday.

    Today she writes;

    President Obama signed into law the most significant tax bill in nearly a decade Friday, a day after overcoming liberal resistance in Congress to continue for two more years tax breaks enacted under president George W. Bush and to provide a fresh federal boost for the tepid economic recovery.

    That’s one magic pen.