This is the best written “Hitler Responds” video I’ve seen.  Most of them are cheesy but this one’s creative AND topical.

Government in America is getting downright scary these days.  This is just one twenty eight-year old’s perspective, but the wanton abuse of civil and political rights seems to be accelerating very rapidly and is much more shameless than at any time in my life that I can recall.

“Our small boats were attempting to slow down the Japanese harpoon vessel Yushin Maru No. 2, which is aggressively tailing the Steve Irwin,” Captain Paul Watson said on the Sea Shepherd website.

During the incident, he said American Brian Race was jabbed twice in the face with a bamboo pole, receiving lacerations above his right eye and on his nose.

South African Russell Bergh, a cameraman for cable television channel Animal Planet, was struck in the right arm and shoulder with an iron grappling hook, resulting in deep bruising.

Watson said French photographer Guillaume Collet was also hit in the right arm and shoulder by a grappling hook and injured.

Japan’s Fisheries Agency disputed the account, accusing the activists of starting the conflict by using ropes to try to disable the ship’s rudder and propeller and hurling at least 30 bottles containing paint.

My take is that the Sea Shepherds do at times provoke and play deadly chicken with the whalers.  However, if the Japanese are merely interested in research as they claim to be, the correct response is to exit the situation. Let. It. Go.

My Climate and Society professor had to run blacked out while taking core samples of the ocean floor off the coast of Somalia.  When I asked why they didn’t just carry guns, his response was, “because we’re scientists and we don’t do that.”

Side note: I am eminently pleased to read that Animal Planet is filming a fifth season of Whale Wars.  I was concerned they might not return to the Antarctic.

“it was more important to do the right thing as he saw it and risk failing the lane than to take the easy option and follow through on the briefed plan.”

It’s an interesting story.  I recall from the 2007 Col. John Boyd Memorial Conference at Quantico that the Norwegian Navy challenges candidates with similar twists in their version of OCS.

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place.

What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers.

A daring speech given his audience.

[Researchers] found that 84 of the tortoises had genetic indicators that one of their parents was a C. elephantopus, 30 of which were less than 15 years of age. Given the 100-year lifespan of the tortoises the researchers say there is a good chance that their C. elephantopus parent would still be alive.

“To our knowledge, this is the first report of the rediscovery of a species by way of tracking the genetic footprints left in the genomes of its hybrid offspring,” said study researcher Ryan Garrick [of] University of Mississippi.

Members of Veterans For Freedom usually grate on me when speaking in their official capacity but Lt. Zirkle was tolerable.

The one who really needs to be exposed is Major Ewing, who is transparently full of boloney and doesn’t belong on the news except to be exposed as such. What civilian viewers might not realize is that he’s using his rank (the most senior on the panel) to shut down his fellow panel members without honest debate. He wants us, with no independent examination of whether he has demonstrated his knowledge of the subject matter, to take him more seriously than the rest because he holds a higher military rank.  This goes a long way toward explaining why he, with such unqualified authority, references the “big picture” as if he knows something the rest of us don’t about how the Middle East, riven by revolution and a nuclear arms race that appears increasingly likely to go kinetic, is more stable than it was in 2002 and about how Iraq’s democratic government, in which there’s an arrest warrant for the Vice President and in which many army divisions identify on politicized lines, is functioning.  As a vet and a Marine, one picks up on these things.

Also, I find it hard to believe that any Iraqi told him in honesty that they wanted the US military to deliver “freedom” from the insurgency.  They may have used the word “security” or “stability,” but in my experience the only ones in Iraq throwing around the word “freedom” were US servicemembers.

It’s unfortunate that the format of the panel did not allow for PBS to challenge him on his fantastical political assessment.  Military officers, especially those on active duty, need to be challenged immediately on such public statements.  And if their military duties don’t allow them to arrive at certain assessments in a public setting, then they should not be asked the questions in the first place because they cannot be trusted to give the truthful answers on which television news is predicated.

Everyone in Iraq wanted a better life. I don’t think there are many of us who wanted it the way it turned out.

Verizon backed away on Friday from plans to charge customers a $2 fee to pay their bills online or over the phone after receiving thousands of complaints, the latest victory in a wave of consumer activism that has roiled some of the nation’s largest companies.

The announcement came a day after the fee was made public. Consumer advocacy groups derided the charge as pay-to-pay.” The fee also caught the eye of Verizon’s regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, which had said it would look into the issue. But it was individual consumers — amped up after battles this year with corporate giants such as Bank of America and Target — that the company said tipped the scale.

They roundly blasted the fee on social media sites. About three dozen people launched petitions on calling for an end to the charge, with one getting more than 100,000 signatures within a few hours.