News broke yesterday that the U.S. military has suffered, and is continuing to suffer, the worst, and most significant wartime security breach in living memory. Apparently, insurgent groups in Afghanistan using portable satellite dishes and online programs have hacked into the surveillance network feeds of America’s Predator drones. I wish I could say this was a surprising, unprecendented event. But unfortunately, its not. It’s part of the growing trend of the U.S. losing the IT war to, well, to everyone.
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Sphere: Related Content Tags: hacking, insurgents, predator drone, procurement system
The American economy is in a weird place right now. We’ve just gotten over a double bubble pair of economic expansions and are currently entering what may be the latter phases of The Great Recession. Things are starting to look less horrible now than they were a few months ago, although they’re still dark and depressing. By some measures, unemployment is as high as 20%, by others its as high as 10%. Neither number is remotely good. Even so, productivity is up for the third straight quarter, and the Dow Jones has gained around 3000 pts since last spring.
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Sphere: Related Content Tags: bubble, economic growth, jobless recovery
For your consideration, I present two NFL quarterbacks over a roughly equivalent period.
QB 1: 14 games 11 starts, 18 TDs, 12 INTs, 54.8 completion %, 2608 yds, 6.2 yds/att, 76.0 QB rating
QB 2: 13 games 13 starts, 13 TDs, 13 INTs, 54.6 completion %, 2206 yds, 5.6 yds/att, 69.1 QB rating
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Sphere: Related Content Tags: chiefs, matt cassel, quarterbacks, tyler thigpen
Posted by: Sean DeCoursey in Royals
I haven’t written about the team since the season ended, so here’s a quickfire recap if for some reason the only thing you read on the entire internet is an occasionally updated non-specific focused blog.
Mark Teahan was traded to the White Sox for Chris Getz and Josh Fields
Noel Arguelles was signed for $7 million over five years
Jason Kendall was signed for $6 million over two years
Miguel Olivio, John Buck, Coco Crisp, Josh Anderson, John Bale, Jamey Wright, Yasuhiko Yabuta, and Mike Jacobs were all cut, released, non-tendered and otherwise told to go work somewhere else
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Sphere: Related Content Tags: dayton moore, gmdm, jason kendall, kansas city, noel arguelles, Royals
Well, not a lot is known at this time. What we are sure of: 12 people dead, 30 or more wounded, including the gunman, tentatively identified as MAJ Nidal Hassan, a psychiatrist who had just received deployment orders to Iraq and was not happy about it.
According to the limited information available on MAJ Hassan, he is the son of Jordanian (or Palestinian, or “a town near Jerusalem”) immigrants, grew up in Virginia, and joined the military out of high school against the wishes of his parents. He appeared to have quite the successful career prior to apparently going crazy and killing a lot of people.
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Sphere: Related Content Tags: ft. hood, gun rampage, MAJ Nidal Malik Hassan, ptsd, shootings
Saw this post over at the blog Fire Dayton Moore. It’s basically a list of GMDM’s biggest hits versus Insanity Wolf’s ramblings. And before I read that post, I had no idea who or what Insanity Wolf was, so if you don’t either, don’t sweat it. My personal favorite?
“Your team can’t score runs. Trade for a DH with a .299 OBP. Pay him millions.”
Sphere: Related Content Tags: cool thing from the internet, fire dayton moore, gmdm, insanity wolf
Afghanistan has been back in the news lately, along with a bunch of discussion of the supposed “return of MacArthurism” - check McChrystal’s speech, not the one Q&A segment, and the whole thing is pretty much pro current policy -but the one thing I haven’t heard anyone talking about is how we’re just setting ourselves up to make the exact same kinds of mistakes we’ve made before.
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Sphere: Related Content Tags: afghanistan, corruption, incompetence, insurgency, karzai, vietnam
This isn’t a dig on the President. I mean, I voted for him, and I campaigned for him. Even met the guy once way back when he was a University of Chicago guy. And I have to say, W T F. I mean, we already knew the Nobel commitee harbored some hardcore “America Sucks” opinions, but this is just pretty much completely confirms it. Yes, we didn’t abrogate our constitution to give Bush & Torture/Graft Inc. another term. Yay us. But that’s not a reason to hand out the world’s formerly most prestigious award to someone 20 years early.
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Posted by: Sean DeCoursey in Royals
The Royals 2009 season ended fittingly for this team, namely, with three straight losses to the Twins so they could go on to the post season and get creamed by the Yankees. So while there’s still another good month or so of baseball left to be played, the offseason/hot stove league started for Royals fans on Sunday afternoon. Like everyone else with a Royals blog, I’m running a piece on how to fix, or at least moderately improve the team. After each position and suggested changes, I’ll list what appears to be the consensus from other Royals bloggers.
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Sphere: Related Content Tags: gmdm, offseason, position analysis, trey hillman
