XBradTC

I’m too lazy today to put up any real content.

Years ago, when I first stumbled upon Doctrine Man, his witty comments inspired the team during our journey to a faraway land, as we suffered through countless inventories and endless PowerPoint trauma in a deployment devoid of wartime rules of accountability and teeming with storyboards. Those times were remarkable, but paled in comparison to time in the mythical land of TRADOCia, where I discovered the pinnacle of mission command, education, and development of our future leaders. It is also where Doctrine Man reigns in relative anonymity, thriving in ambiguity (or “plain sight” as I soon learned): a requirement described throughout the Army’s Human Dimension White Paper that Tom Ricks critiqued and Doctrine Man defended recently as both valuable and necessary.

via A Side Platter of Snark — Medium.

Go ahead and read the 20 questions with Doctrine Man. We don’t always agree with him, but we always learn something.

I’ve never really tried to learn Photoshop or other editing software. But today we gave Photoscape a quick try, and one of our first efforts was to see how we could apply fake tilt shift to an image.

Original pic

Tilt Shift

Obviously, a steep learning curve ahead of us.

We get the occasional SEO marketing pitch that sneaks through our email spam filter. We occasionally get offers from publishers for advance copies of books. We sometimes get pitches for others to guest author here.*

But this is the first time we’ve been approached to be a guest author at someone else’s site.

Good afternoon,

My name is Brooks Clifford, I’m part of the online marketing team at  http://nationalcarryacademy.com/  We provide classes, training and information to certify over 15,000 citizens with their conceal to carry permit each year. The reason I’m e-mailing you today is that we did some research and found you to be a highly regarded criminal defense attorney.

We wanted to ask if you would be interested in providing insight to our readers in the form of a blog once a quarter and in return we are happy to provide you a backlink to your website and add you to our “Additional Resource” page for clients in your state.

The benefits of having you guest blog for our website include: building high quality links back to your own website, increase visibility to your website, and building an audience through a new channel. We’re looking for fresh faces to write with our team to help build new perspectives as well as provide different point of views on a variety of topics related self defense and firearms law.

While we have a long list of topics to cover ourselves, we’d be more than open to any ideas you’d have on your own. Please contact me at brooks@nationalcarryacademy.com if you’d be interested in working together. I look forward to hearing back.

Best,

Brooks Clifford
CMO National Carry Academy

I’ll let you in on a little secret. If your Chief Marketing Officer’s research leads you to believe that I’m a highly regarded criminal  defense attorney, you probably shouldn’t have anything to do with teaching anyone anything.  I’d hate to see the quality of your research into the concealed carry laws in the various states.

*Genuine readers that have an idea for submission are welcome. We’re talking about spam marketers here.

From almost the very start of the Great War, the British were bedeviled by Zeppelin raids. The airships could fly far higher and faster than many of the airplanes sent to oppose them. They also raided by night, and in pre-radar days were hard to find and intercept.

Naturally, it occurred to British authorities to strike them in their lairs, as it were, in the gigantic Zeppelin sheds on German airfields. This led to a raid in July 1918 that was every bit as daring as the Doolittle Raid of 1942, but is much less well known. Like Doolittle’s raid, the naval aviation raid on the Zeppelin sheds at Tondern, Germany (modern Tonder, Denmark) were consequential, daring, hazardous, and dependent on technology strained to the uttermost. Like Doolittle’s raid, not everyone came home.

via Zeppelin Raid: 19 July 1918 | WeaponsMan.

I saw this on the Overnight Thread at Ace’s the other day. It’s a fascinating story.

So, James Fallows had a lengthy piece in the Atlantic. It’s been getting some buzz.

You can safely skip it.

Instead, you MUST read CDR Salamander’s critique at his place. Which, as lengthy as it is, quotes a goodly portion of the original.

Don’t forget to read Conservative Wahoo’s piece at ID.

I find myself in concurrence with both of them.

Animosity International.

Oh, and they have a CafePress store.

In the wake of the cold blooded assasination of two NYPD officers, the men in blue have felt that NY Mayor Bill DeBlasio has sided with those who urged attacks on police.  The most visible result was hundreds of officers turning their backs to the mayor at Officer Ramos funeral.

But the most effective is likely this:

Citations for traffic violations fell from 10,069 to 587 in the week starting Dec. 22

We’ve been highly critical of the police here before. We hold public servants to a higher standard than the ordinary citizen. You want great respect, act in a great manner.

We generally subscribe to the NYPD’s “broken windows” theory of policing. Curb minor crimes, and you’re more likely to curb major crimes. Any company commander knows that if you maintain the small standards, it’s a lot easier to maintain the big standards.

But the broken windows theory, absent quality leadership, is susceptible to becoming strictly a metrics based approach to policing. The point of broken windows policing is to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods. But when leaders are measured against their peers by how many citations and arrests are made in their areas, versus how many crimes are reported, the temptation to jigger the numbers is great. Pretty soon, officers have a de facto, if no de jure, quota of arrests and citations to make per shift.

Shortly after the murders of Officers Ramos and Liu, when the dissatisfaction of the rank and file became clear, we opined that if they wanted to make their displeasure known, they should simply stop making revenue generating citations.

Mind you, we’re of the mind that police should never be in the business of issuing citations as a means of generating revenue. The paradigm shift from “peace officer” to “law enforcement officer” has been bad both for the police and the public.

As a rule of thumb, we don’t think public employees, not even police officers, should have collective bargaining powers, that is, unions. But we also recognize that  a mayor of a city such as New York simply cannot govern without the support of the largest, most trusted police department in America.

He knows the deal.

There may have been a Volkswagen Bug involved with the making of this post.