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POPSA Silver Lining to Storms of Sorrow About 15 years ago, I hitched a ride to a national security briefing in Thomasville, Georgia, with a fellow I had only recently met. He had just retired as an Army officer after Desert Storm, and we were serving in a reserve capacity with a civilian agency. It was a five-hour drive, which gave us time to become well acquainted, and I am grateful for every minute of that trip. His name is Don Rodgers, and he is one of those people who has never met a stranger. Good story - click on link to read
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POPS12-Year-Old Hero Signals SWAT Team: Military Hand Code "I took all my money out of my pocket. I took off my coat and threw it out the window. I jumped out the window and the police officer brought me to the cafeteria." When asked if he was afraid Zach said: "I was more nervous than afraid." Zach told Rosanna Scotto that he knew about the hand signals from the military. Zach's father is a Marine and his two older brothers are in the Army and currently serving in Iraq. Zach wants to follow in his father's footsteps and become a Marine. (Video of Good Day NY at) http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/good_day_ny/091111-12-Year-Old-Hero-Talks-To-Good-Day-NY
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POPSWhat’s Likely to Happen to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan? Perhaps what’s likely to occur, writes the Chron, is a court-martial under Article 2 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to punish offenses allegedly committed by a man wearing a U.S. military uniform against other military personnel on a military base. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division is responsible for recommending charges, prompting the military equivalent of a grand jury, known as an Article 32 hearing, where both prosecutors and defense can present evidence. Those results would be reviewed by the base commander, who would decide whether to convene a court-martial. The 12-person jury would be composed of officers higher in rank than Hasan " lieutenant colonels and above. Lead Writer Ashby Jones The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog Before becoming a journalist, he worked as a litigator at a large law firm and clerked for a federal judge.
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POPSMajor Hasan - the secret weapon! "He indicated that he would give me a call back and let me know. He contacted me on Saturday and said, I think we're going to make this work. A couple of hours later he called back and said, between the lines, I've been overruled by the White House. There will be no briefing for you this weekend, and early next week on Tuesday we'll give you a briefing.
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POPS Veterans Day 2009: Thank you
They are casualties of war… and as far as I’m concerned, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, who took their cowardly attacker down, is a veteran today. The terrorist enemy doesn’t have a formal chain of command that can sign an armistice, they don’t muster on clearly defined battlefields, and they’re quite happy to benefit from the efforts of deranged fanboys. If we don’t stand behind our professional soldiers, and give them the tools to do their jobs now, we will all become soldiers before this enemy is defeated. Somewhere in the world tomorrow, an American soldier will ring in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day with gunfire. Another will arrive home after an honorable tour of duty, perhaps passing brothers and sisters in arms saying farewell to their families. A mother’s tears will fall on a letter from the far side of the world. Old veterans will spend a beautiful afternoon watching children play beneath the flag they raised at Anzio, Guadalcanal, Incheon, or Khe Sanh.
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POPSManscaping - for real? Gillette is grasping at straws, so to speak, to find new revenue streams with a high-cost campaign to enlist women to send a mass-customized video to their partners. Gina Maniscalco at Lookingood.com was the first to alert me to it, and she raises valid concerns - there are enough hormones generated by these two videos (after watching the first, go to the site promoted at the end of it) to power a small army over a cliff!
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POPSWe Must Be On Guard For Extremism "When dealing with soldiers far from their homes and families and subject to the greatest imaginable stress, the Army needs to be on the watch for the predatory inroads of any form of political or religious extremism -- whether it be the jihadism to which Hasan was drawn or the Christian identity nonsense that inspired Timothy McVeigh."
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POPSCBS and NBC Skip Hasan's Ominous 'We Love Death More Than You Love Life' 
Brian Ross reported: The Washington Post reported today that Hasan presented this PowerPoint presentation at Walter Reed hospital in 2007, saying: “It's getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.” Under comments, he wrote: “We love death more than you love life.” And his conclusion was that Muslim soldiers be given the option of being released from the military, as conscientious objectors, to decrease what he called “adverse events.” Bob Orr, on the CBS Evening News: There were reasons to worry. Hasan received poor performance reviews at Walter Reed, frequently criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in June, 2007, Hasan gave a shocking presentation to colleagues. Using slides, Hasan argued forcing Muslim soldiers to fight wars in Muslim countries puts them “at risk to hurting/killing believers unjustly” and he ominously warned of “adverse events." .....
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POPSNidal Hasan Terrorist Threat 'Not That Big a Deal'....Matthew Yglesias
I think a pretty good case can be made that this kind of situation actually is the main face of the terrorist threat. Not a big well-thought-out plot centrally directed from a “safe haven” in South Asia and undertaken by brilliant covert operatives, but the desperate violent act of a clearly disturbed individual. It’s going to be very hard to prevent this sort of thing. As long as the United States remains a country in which firearms are widely available"for the foreseeable future, in other words"we’re going to be unusually vulnerable to mentally ill spree killers of various kinds, including spree killers who nod in the direction of Islamist thinking. But the larger point is that while these incidents are serious crimes and major tragedies for the victims, they hardly rise to the level of a major macro-level social crisis. They’re certainly not a first-order national security threat. And even put in the lower-stakes context of violent crime in America
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POPSI CALL AS I SEE IT The Obama Administration has sent every American out on a limb, and I don't think it matters to him one way or another. It's all about him and his agenda.......
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POPSRay Shoemaker Feedback Ray Shoemaker has credited his management style to his time in the army. He was a Captain in the United States Army, where he learned to be hard-nosed and efficient.
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POPSWe Need To Do Better For Our Military Much of the study focused on 4th Brigade, home unit to most of the violent crime suspects. 4th Brigade was compared head-to-head with 3rd Brigade, which recently returned from Iraq. The 4th Brigade, now in Afghanistan, has suffered a higher casualty rate than other units its size in two deployments, the Army found, losing lives at a rate more than eight times that of 3rd Brigade. Along with the deaths came intense combat that took a mental toll on troops, the Army found. Soldiers in 4th Brigade were more likely than other soldiers to suffer mental illness. The study also found, though, that soldiers feel their careers can be damaged by seeking mental health help and too often feel that enlisted leaders don't support troops with mental illness. Read the entire article here: http://www.gazette.com/articles/soldiers-58520-report-army.html
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POPSCopy Video Games Easily the best guide I've ever seen on console modification. Taught me how to copy/backup video games on my 360 and my Wii! I can't believe how easy it is. Check it out for yourself today.
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POPSVanished Persian army said found in desert According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt. After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an "oasis," which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again. "A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, whi
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POPSThe Hole at the Heart of Our Strategy ~ Mark Steyn
...to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base. Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions " flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own " taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn. But we’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic .......