Considering and Reconsidering the Iraq War

I’ve had a lot of thoughts on Iraq, on this 20^th anniversary of the start of the invasion.  In fact I started the draft of this post in 2008, well before we could see the results of the war.  But even before then I opposed it.  If I’m honest with myself however, I admit it wasn’t on strictly policy grounds.  This was a personal issue for me.  I was mobilized in 2001 after 9/11 on one-year orders.  It was a hardship being away from family that long, but I figured I would barrel through it and go home.  That didn’t turn out as I’d planned as three weeks before we were to go home, we (some of us anyway) were told that we would be extended on another set of one-year orders.

Man plans, Big Army laughs.

So that’s how 20 years ago today, I spent the day, and night, and day, and night, in an operations center “working the problem” as they say.  No, I wasn’t in Iraq, I was safely in the boundaries of the United States, doing my part for the war effort.  Of course, by that point I had already concluded that we should never have gone into Iraq.  In fact, my epiphany on this occurred several months prior.  A Warrant Officer friend and I were out on break coincidently at the same time, and the looming war came up.  One of us (I don’t remember who) finally broke the ice and said, “why are we doing this?”  It was a relief to have a fellow skeptic out himself.  Being in uniform, our job wasn’t to question policy, but to implement it, and I didn’t see any contradiction between doing my duty and privately disagreeing with the policy.  That’s not uncommon.  But I took duty seriously and wanted to do the best job possible.  American lives could be at stake.

But eventually I took the uniform off and returned home, and could think more seriously about policy.  The whole reason I put the uniform on in the first place wasn’t because of Saddam Hussain, but Usama Bin Ladin, and the Global War on Terror (GWOT). While policy makers were saying that we could fight a two-front war, one in Afghanistan, and one in Iraq, I knew that was nonsense.  You would have had to have a draft to build an Army big enough to properly handle both theaters, and there was no taste in Washington for anything like that.  Afghanistan, as long as Bin Ladin was on the loose, to me seemed the bigger problem.  Saddam Hussain and his constant trolling of the US was a problem, but not the major problem.

Of course I wasn’t on board with any of the leftie critics of the war, “Bush lied, people died” was as much an absurdity as the purpose of the war being for Cheney to get contracts for Halliburton.  The problem was, after a year of public discussion on the threat of WMD’s we didn’t do a good job of discussing if that was an active or inactive threat.  The truth was, Saddam had a nuclear weapons program, but the catch was that it was inactive due to the crush of sanctions.  After the war, when we had free reign of the country, we found a lot of evidence of Iraqi programs, just not active ones.

US reveals Iraq nuclear operation

Gas shell findings a concern for Iraq arms inspector

At last! Have they finally found a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in Iraq?

Syria said to have Iraq arms

Secret U.S. mission hauls uranium from Iraq

…and so on.

But the weapons program ultimately didn’t matter except as a pretext.  Is Iraq better off post invasion than pre-invasion? 

In Commentary, Eli Lake makes the argument that Iraq is better off.

“Despite massive corruption and the reverberations of a political crisis that began in 2019 with widespread protest, Iraq is better off today than it was 20 years ago.

In 2003, the World Bank estimated that Iraq’s GDP was a paltry $21.9 billion. In 2021, Iraq’s GDP was nearly $208 billion. During Saddam’s reign, only a small number of Iraqis had cellphone subscriptions. As of 2021, 86 percent of the country had a wireless telecom plan. Several measures of quality of life, from literacy rates to life expectancy, have gone up. Just one example: Before the advent of Covid, life expectancy in Iraq had risen to 72 years. In 2001, it was 67.”

By the numbers, Iraq probably is better off, although Iraqis who lost family members in the war and the multiple insurgencies that spawned as a result of the war may disagree, but was the war worth it to us?  That’s something that slips by Lake’s analysis.  We dropped a lot of blood and treasure in that war, and if anything, the war was a negative for the US.

And of course there are a hundred crap countries all over the world who might be better off after a US invasion (minus the casualties of the invasion of course), but my ultimate conclusion on Iraq is, to paraphrase Bismarck, not worth a single life of an 11B (infantry soldier to you non Army pukes).

But the current administration and establishment has apparently forgotten all that, just like that fish Dory, which has a short-term memory of just a few seconds, now we’re staring greedily at a new war, that has even less to do with US national interest than Iraq did.  So, like an episode of Seinfeld, no lessons are ever learned.

9/11 20 Years Later

I don’t know if I could have imagined in my wildest nightmares where we have found ourselves 20 years from 9/11.  Certainly Afghanistan looks very much like it did 20 years ago, after a two decade American interregnum that for a moment in history tried to remake a tribal, Islamic country into Switzerland, minus the chocolate.  It was a massive disaster of course, and our departure from it made worse by a senile President, and useless military officers whose war plans included joining the board of this or that Defense contractor, but never actually winning an actual war.

Now that’s decadence.

Of course 20 years ago it all looked so different; frightening and unknowable.  I remember where I was, as does almost everyone of a certain age.  I was at my office at work, working away with my headset in, listening to the Howard Stern Show.  Stern was a much bigger deal then than he is now.  Now he’s on satellite, richer, and plays it a lot safer, but at the time he was a regular on morning airwaves nationwide, and many of us got our first taste of something going off the rails by listening to his show. 

The first plane could have been an accident, still a major story, but after the second plane hit, no one was really entertaining the idea that it was an accident.  It was terrorism surely, but by whom, and why?

Our office was one in which most of the workers, unless engaged in meetings or training, were heads down at their desks, almost all listening to their own headsets.  People started to look worried, got up to go over to the cubicle of friends, “did you hear…”  There was a lot of calling friends and family.  In my case, my wife called me.  She had missed work to take our son to the doctor and on the way back was also listening to Stern.  However she thought it was a stupid radio bit.  After she got home and cut on the TV, she saw it was not.

Meanwhile at the office, work was pretty much shot for the day.  People were frightened; I was frightened. I remember my boss cutting on one of the TV’s in a meeting room on to a news channel and people would wander in, to watch as much as they could take, and then wander out again.

Of course, being in the Reserves, I knew that I would be called up sooner or later, and later turned out to be about 2 months later. And that occupied the next 22 months of my life.  I appreciated the support I received from my company (I’m still employed by them) and my family.  My wife told me to return with my shield or on it, which rather quickly wore off once the reality of the separation sank in. But all that sacrifice lead to what exactly?

The jihad goes on.  America is still the biggest enemy, but one that’s shown it can be beaten, as it was in Afghanistan. We did get Bin Ladin, but we didn’t get jihad.  It’s still out there.  We did a lot of damage, and we did quite a lot to disrupt the leadership of the various Islamic terror groups, which probably damaged the ability of terrorist groups to replicate their success of 9/11.  But the jiahd remains, and we’re much weaker than we were 20 years ago.

But I think the biggest damage inflicted was the damage we inflicted on ourselves.  Twenty years ago, we were a confident superpower; a hyper-power it was said.  Hardly anyone thinks that now.  We squandered our blood and treasure on Iraq and a morphed mission in Afghanistan.  We turned on ourselves, got woke, and proceeded, bit by bit, to dissemble our history, culture, and sense of being a people. The superpower that steeled itself for a long conflict twenty years ago, is now a former superpower, spent and just waiting for the actual little push needed to prove that we no longer have ability to accomplish things (as if the incompetent pullout from Afghanistan didn’t already make that clear to the world).

If I were Muslim, I would be hard pressed not to look at the last twenty years as a victory of Allah over the American infidels.  Americans challenged Allah, and destroyed themselves.

A Sampling of Light Beers

Light beers are not part of my regular beer diet.  I consider kicking back and having a beer a treat, so I can’t be concerned overly much about how it affects the bottom line of my bathroom scale. Of course, beers are not for every day in my world.  I’m saving that sort of wacky lifestyle for retirement.  But I do come across a light beer now and again and have made a few snap judgments about some of them.

Warning: I must caveat that all light beers taste like water with a little bit of beer mixed in, so take that into consideration when considering the ratings.

 

Bud Light Orange

Carbs: 14.3    Calories: 142

Beers with flavors are somewhat of a crapshoot, and that goes double with light beers.  The Orange “taste” really does seem to imitate an orange artificial taste, if that’s what you are looking for.  It started out OK but by the end of the beer, I was really getting sick of that fake orange.

Rating:  Would not buy again

Yuengling Flight

Carbs: 2.6      Calories: 95

Although this beer shares the light beer problem of being watery, it’s actually not that watery.  In other words, it’s in the upper tier of light beers just on that alone.  However it’s still watery enough that it’s somewhat lacking in flavor. And although I felt the faint hint of an aftertaste, it never quite got there, which, in the light beer arena, is not bad.

Rating:  OK if that’s what is left

IC Light Mango Premium Light Beer

 

Carbs:            5.3      Calories:  126.50   (for a pint)

Small breweries and microbrews don’t usually dip into the Light Beer market since almost always their inspiration is creating flavorful, delicious beers, but Pittsburg Brewing dared dip its toes into it, and came up with a not bad beer. Again, it’s a light beer, but the flavor is there, if of course muted, and diluted.  However on a hot day, this seems like a good choice.

Rating: Pretty good for a Lite

Bud Light Platinum Lager

 

Carbs: 4.4      Calories: 137

This is described as “triple filtered” so that sounds important.  Plus it’s called Platinum, which sounds fancy.  As far as light beers go, I couldn’t find too much to complain about, but it’s another side reminder that no one is searching out light beers for their full, rich taste.

Rating: Could be a great mixer with a real beer.

 

 

 

Blue Moon LightSky Citrus Wheat

 

I could keep going on this light beer list.  There are, after all, plenty of light beers to choose from, but after trying this, I decided to stop. I’ve drank enough light beers to know that the flavor runs from bad to OK.  None of them are great enough to enjoy for flavor on it’s own. But this one seems to hit the top levels of “OK.”  The promise of the name is actually met for this beer.  It has a faint hint of citrus and it’s somewhat wheaty.  Watery?  Sure, but not to the degree that the others are. That’s important.

Rating:  If you are going to get Light Beer, get this one.

This may sound like a very lackluster review of beers, but light beers fill a niche for people who want to continue to drink, but are wary of the sheer number of carbs and calories that go along with it.  If you are throwing a party or get-together, you need to have light beers available to accommodate the people who are on nutrition alert.  Not only that, it’s a good way to cut a beer that you’ve decided you don’t like that much.  It’s a useful household item, and I don’t mind having them around.

Bacon or Breakfast Diet: Finally a Diet Made for Me

January is a good time to roll out the food and diet related posts because diet is on the top of the resolutions list.  Well that and working out.  I’ve noticed that my gym gets packed in January, at least for the first few weeks, and then gradually the numbers return to normal as enthusiasm wanes and laziness waxes.  That’s true for diets too, so it occurred to me that there was a new one that had been nagging me for a while until I finally pulled the diet trigger.

It was a spur of the moment decision, but I decided to try the bacon diet; at least I tried it for a day. At first blush, it sounds like any other crazed diet which is all about attention and little about nutrition.  Like the ice cream diet or the pickle diet, the bacon diet does sound a bit ridiculous, but hey, bacon is a high protein, zero carbohydrate food.  And doggone it, it’s so good…

I first heard about it on Facebook when someone posted a story on a 30 day bacon diet.  The upshot is that after 30 days of eating nothing but bacon, the dieter lost body fat; lost weight (so ironically was less porky afterword… Zing!), had good lab work results, and just overall felt good about it.

It’s truly a miracle food.

Anyway, my day on the bacon diet amounted to frying up about two or three slices of bacon every 3 or so hours throughout the day.  I wasn’t hungry, and by the end of the day, wasn’t tired of bacon.  Since it was just one day I obviously can’t confirm the positive blood panel results from the 30 day bacon dieter, but I imagine it’s not that different from my own low carb lifestyle.

Of course, there is the N-word to worry about: Nitrates. Thirty days is probably not long enough to cause a problem, but over time who knows?  The information I’ve come across is all over the place about that.

Hey I’m no doctor so what do I know?  But if the threat of cancer or the gout is enough to scare you away from a bacon diet, why not just go one more step and add eggs?  Suddenly you have twice the variety with the same zero carb goodness. “Brinner” is already considered a special evening treat, and really the only reason we find it odd to eat bacon and eggs for dinner is simply social convention.  It’s still a good, filling meal. If anyone has done a 30 day breakfast diet challenge I would be curious to hear the results.

My Dinner With Ikea

J/K.  I didn’t actually eat there, although I noticed that every menu item helpfully had the calorie count, from the Americanized Chicken Fingers to more native Swedish meatballs and Salmon (mm…Sjorapport!).  Actually, I had hoped to have shed this mortal coil without actually ever entering an Ikea, but man plans, God laughs.  My daughter, getting ready to move into a new apartment, wanted an Ikea dresser, and the fact that we already had a dresser sitting in the garage for her (made from Wal-Mart’s finest particleboard) did not tempt her in the least.  Instead, she wanted to spend whatever meager funds she had on a new dresser. So off we went.

After crossing the desert (Interstate traffic during rush hour) we eventually made it to this false temple of consumerism. Frankly, my initial impression was, “what’s the big deal?”  It looked like a Costco, warehouse ceilings and all.  But as we wandered through the various home furnishing displaces, I recognized Ikea for what it really was, Service Merchandise.

Service Merchandise was a retail store that existed until 2002 (it now exists as a web only business).  It was much like any comparable department store of its day, Sears, JC Penny’s, or Zayre, but it had a gimmick. Instead of filling up a cart with their useless crap, you actually took a ticket, went to a service desk to pay for your items, and the boxed item would come out on a conveyer belt from the warehouse, like a baggage carousel.  I have childhood memories of shopping this way and found it annoying.  But at least the right boxes were delivered to you.  The Swedes had figured out a way to dumb down even that process.

In the display room area of Ikea, you didn’t even get tags with the numerical code of the item; you had to write those down yourself.  Then you went to the warehouse area, and wandered through it until you actually came across the correct shelving and boxes.  Service Merchandise was way ahead of its time compared to Ikea. But…it wasn’t hip to shop at Service Merchandise; the opposite in fact.  Ikea on the other hand, seems to have some sort of cool factor.  For the life of me, I can’t figure out why, but cool isn’t something you figure out, you either get it or you don’t, and when it comes to Ikea, I’m clearly in the latter category.

One interesting thing I noticed was about the people who shopped there.  There were a pretty high number of women wearing hajibs. In spite of that, I rated the Head Chop Threat Level Matrix to be low.  I don’t think it topped a 2.  After all, Sweden is practically a colony of the Caliphate, so I imagine that they want to safeguard their new possessions.

To me, the real disappointment about Ikea is that the furniture is not particularly attractive or interesting looking.  I just wouldn’t care to have it in my house.  Hopefully, I won’t have to repeat my visit there, and if I can accomplish that modest goal, then I’ve had a life well lived.

Zero Carb Day

Just as an experiment, I wanted to try to go an entire day without having a single carbohydrate.  For a one day experiment, I wasn’t really interested in the weight loss aspect of low to no carb dieting.  I was more interested in what I would eat and how would I feel?

Coffee:  When it comes to coffee, I’m not that manly, I prefer lots of cream and flavor in my coffee, but even the no fat/no sugar creamers have carbs.  So what to do?  I came up with a pretty good alternative by using heavy cream.  That’s fairly high in the calories department but its zero carbs.  In addition, for flavoring I came across a coffee creamer called Walden Farms Flavored Coffee Creamer.  This is zero carbs, zero calories, zero everything.  It made a pretty good substitute for my usual fancy coffee creamer mix. And for a dollop of whipped cream, Land O’ Lakes Sugar Free Heavy Cream is a zero carb whip cream.  It’s the only one I’ve found in the stores although there could be others.

Breakfast:  This was the easiest; a simple breakfast of bacon and eggs.  With bacon, you really can’t go wrong.  However odd though it may seem, there are some varieties of eggs that do have carbohydrates (usually one carb per egg).  So be sure and check your egg container to see what the specific nutritional specifics are for your egg carton.

Lunch:  Again I kept it simple; a hamburger patty with a slice of cheese on top.  Like with the eggs, you need check the cheeses to find a zero carb one.  Although they are mostly a low carb food item, I discovered only a few have no carbs at all.  So again, you have to check.

Dinner:  Too much beef makes Jack a stuffed boy, so I decided to go with fish for dinner.  Tilapia is a nice zero carb fish, and with some olive oil and garlic salt, a tasty one too.  Of course, I put garlic salt on everything so what do I know?

Snack:  No evening is complete without a snack in front of the TV. But when it comes to snacking, the pickings are rather slim for a zero carb alternative. In fact, the only thing I could find was pork rinds.  Now lucky me I’m a fan of pork rinds so it was no sacrifice at all, but I’ve heard that some of the more primitive (non Southern) parts of the country may find it in short supply.  Eh sorry.  I guess you can order it on Amazon.

I monitored my glucose levels during the day, going from 103 after my first cup of zero carb coffee to 104 before dinner to 97 about 2 hours after dinner.  So I imagine if you’re diabetic going a day without carbs might be a good way to get your sugar under control if you have a problem with a swinging glucose levels.  However I’m not a doctor or diabetic so what do I know?  I’m just going by my own experience.

The problem with a zero carb lifestyle is that it’s just not sustainable for very long.  I was full the entire day and never had a bit of hunger or craving for something sweet, but the limited amount of food available that is zero carbohydrates makes this difficult to sustain.  I’m not even sure it would be healthy to sustain, but it can’t hurt to set aside carbs for a day.

As for my original question, how would I feel, I have to say that I felt fine.  No extra exhaustion or fatigue from denying my body those precious carbohydrates.  And although weight loss wasn’t a goal, I lost 2 1/2 pounds in a day.

 

 

 

When you can’t see PTSD

Before I retired from the Army Reserves, my last unit was a small detachment where we worked special projects.  So drill for us was spent behind a computer, researching and working on various work products. Although I was a newly promoted Sergeant First Class, I was selected as detachment NCO.  I wasn’t the senior NCO in the unit however. There was another SFC who had date of rank on me by several years.  However when he was asked to be the Detachment NCO, he turned it down flat.  Generally, that just isn’t done.  The senior person is supposed to be preparing, and willing to take over when personnel leave, but he was having none of it.  So when I was asked to assume those responsibilities (I accepted of course-although it was less of an ask and more a matter of being told) it wasn’t because I was just so great that the unit leadership thought I was a perfect choice, it was because the person who should have done it just flatly refused.

But being asked to take over as senior Non Commissioned Officer for the detachment was merely a formality.  The truth is he was supposed to take the job, and it was confounding to the unit leadership that he out and out refused.  I didn’t get it either, and I had asked him.  He just waved me off on that one; he didn’t seem to have a clear reason or couldn’t seem to articulate it. This wasn’t the first time that Sergeant Ed (that’s what I’ll call him) had troubles with the unit leadership.  Months prior he had gotten in a shouting match with a Major over…nothing.  He had just lost his temper for no reason.

That should have been a clue for me, but I totally missed it.

Sergeant Ed had been deployed to Iraq and had been back for about two years at that point.  He didn’t enjoy his deployment.  Not being sarcastic here but some guys do.  They like the adventure, the camaraderie, and the extra combat pay.  And the younger you are, the less cognizant of danger you are.  That’s why young guys traditionally make the best soldiers.  Sergeant Ed wasn’t a young guy when he was deployed though.  He was in his fifties; an unimaginably ancient age to be deployed in a combat zone for the active services, but strictly routine for Guard and Reserve.

What’s worse, he was deployed in an entirely different Military Occupational Specialty than the one he had been working in for the past couple years.  That wasn’t as uncommon as it should have been.  Something similar happened to me.  I was deployed in my original MOS, not the one I had been working in the previous decade.  At least in my case it was a field that was fairly close to the one I had been working in, so the transition for me wasn’t as extreme.

So he was supposed to be a supervisor (he had the rank) and be an expert in, a field he hadn’t worked in about 15 years.  In a combat zone, with people he hadn’t worked with before.

No pressure.

None the less, that was all in the past, and I didn’t connect it with his performance in the unit.  Until one day…

We were at work one day, each at our workstations working on our various aspects of our project, when he turned to me and asked what I thought was a really off the wall question.

“Say when you’re online, do you ever look at…”

Now here I was preparing myself for some description of some off the wall aspect of pornography.  I steeled myself for the description of some fetish that I really didn’t want to hear about.

“…car crash scenes?”

“Huh?  No.  What?”

That threw me.  I have seen car crash photos online.  Years ago there was a troll on a forum I used to go to that would either post or misidentify links to auto accidents.  But I sure wouldn’t go searching for them.  Who would?

He then proceeded to tell me how he would wake up in the middle of the night and search for gruesome car crashes online.  He couldn’t explain exactly why he did it, but he described it as a compulsion, a compulsion that had its roots in his deployment to Iraq.

And that’s when the story came out.

He had gone on sick call; something minor, and while sitting in the waiting room there was a large explosion outside on the street.  An bomb had gone off, killing several people.  That part sounds like just a news report, but he was in the waiting room of that medical detachment when the stretchers came into the facility.  These were stretchers full of body parts; arms, legs…other parts.  All the while he was helpless to do anything.

That morning became the defining moment of his deployment.  It was the trigger to his post traumatic stress disorder, and I had worked with the guy for two years and didn’t have a clue.

Oh I had sat through the Army briefings on PTSD, and thought I would be able to detect the symptoms in a fellow soldier, but I didn’t.  Instead, I judged him, just like the rest of my detachment command judged him.  We didn’t have a clue even though the clues in his behavior were sprinkled all around us.

But I think what really threw me was his age.  I just didn’t expect an adult in his fifties to be traumatized that way.  For some reason, it made more sense to me that a guy in his twenties would be more affected.  But when you are in your fifties?  It was nonsensical prejudice and maybe it’s one that isn’t emphasized enough.  But it was a difficult lesson to learn.

At least he was taken care of properly by the VA.  Although there are a million and one terrible VA stories, there are even more that were successful.  In this case, he got the help he needed. But my regret, is that I didn’t support him in the way that he needed, when he really needed it.

 

My Lean Cuisine Low Carb Resolution

I have been “dieting” for a few years with some measure of success although I tend to lose the same weight over again.  I suppose I could claim that I lost a hundred pounds last year, but it was within the same 10 to 12 pound range.  Still, I managed to leave 2014 8 pounds lighter than when I entered it.

For the past few years I’ve been on some variation of a low fat diet, and it worked, just like any other diet, as long as you maintain it.  In terms of pure weight loss, I imagine all diets are pretty equal when it comes to losing the weight.  Maintaining the weight is another matter. But as virtually all diet gurus will say, you have to change your lifestyle.  I think on this regard, I’ve successfully accomplished that.

My cheat for that is that I’ve established a spreadsheet and I log in everything I eat based on fat grams or for this year, grams of carbohydrates.  Logging your meals establishes a discipline both to monitor your food intake, and it lets you know exactly where you are going wrong.  I do allow cheat days, when I don’t log at all, and that’s when the oopsies occur, but normally, the simple act of tracking keeps me on the straight and narrow food wise.

This year, I’ve decided to switch things around and try low carb.   What constitutes “low carb” probably can be anything from 150 carbohydrate grams per day all the way down to 25 grams.  For real weight loss, you probably have to keep it down to 50 grams a day but 150 grams is probably fine for most people.  I still have a few pounds to go to reach my goal weight, so for right now I’ll try to keep it down to less than 50 grams per day.

Since the beginning of the year is the time when everyone hops on the resolution bandwagon, the grocery stores are thick with sales for their “healthy” frozen foods.  This week, for whatever reason, it’s Lean Cuisine.  Lean Cuisine entrees’ are fairly decent all purpose meals for dieting and can be used in a wide variety of diets.  It even has Weight Watcher points on the box for those who follow Weight Watchers.   But when it comes to carbohydrates and sugars, you have to eyeball the each package and check the “Nutrition Facts” label. 

To save myself some time I decided to go ahead and pre check the Lean Cuisine entrees ahead of time so I’m not some shlub standing in front of the frozen food section with the door open too long.  I made an arbitrary call to keep my meal selections to ones that were 30 grams of carbohydrates or less.  That way I could eat one of these meals a day and still be able to utilize other low carb items for breakfast and dinner without going over the 50 gram limit.

 

Lean Cuisine Meals under 30 grams of carbohydrates:

Baked Chicken                                30 grams

Beef Pot Roast                                 25 grams

Chicken Carbonara                         29 grams

Chicken Marsala                              23 grams

Chicken with Basil Cream Sauce 28 grams

Glazed Chicken                               26 grams

Grilled Chicken Caesar                  30 grams

Herb Roasted Chicken                   20 grams

Meatloaf with Mashed Potatoes    25 grams

Roasted Turkey & Vegetables       18 grams

Salisbury Steak                                23 grams

Shrimp Alfredo                                 29 grams

Steak Tips Portabello                      14 grams

Grilled Chicken Primavera             30 grams

Rosemary Chicken                          29 grams

Stuffed Cabbage                             28 grams

 

More of a Snack but still…

Broccoli Cheddar Dip with Pita Bread                29 grams

Cheese and Tomato Snack Pizza                        23 grams

Fajita Style Spring Rolls                                        20 grams

Garden Vegetable Dip with Pita Bread               29 grams

Garlic Chicken Spring Rolls                                  24 grams

Pepperoni Snack Pizza                                         0 grams (?)

Spinach & Artichoke Snack Pizza                       24 grams

Spinach Artichoke Dip with Pita Bread              29 grams

Thai Style Chicken Spring Rolls                          23 grams

 

Having a full list ahead of time should save some time at the grocery store and it’s a pretty handy reference.  We’ll see how it goes.

 

 

Trolling Feminists

I was being entertained the other day by a buddy of mine who for no discernible reason started trolling one of his feminist Facebook friends.  Now that’s more of a game that I like to play, although usually not on Facebook and usually not with friends.  And it was especially surprising since this particular friend is a very non confrontational sort who more often plays the peacemaker rather than the instigator.   He’s more than once tried to mediate disagreements between friends with a joke or distracting comment. But social media makes jerks of us all, and I guess basic humanity prevented him from being assimilated longer than most.  But the lure of being a smart ass pulls us all in eventually.

The set up is this:  His feminist friend posted a slightly bawdy joke.  As jokes go, it’s it’s mildly amusing to a guy, but to women, for whom the threshold of humor is much lower, it’s Hee-lar-e-us.  If you want the full story, go here.  The gist of it as that an old codger begins signing his credit card with a penis illustration.   Hilarity ensues when the card reader at Wal-Mart doesn’t recognize the penis as his signature and management is called in.  Funny right?  Well not to a feminist; at least usually.  In fact if my friend had posted this joke, he likely would have been subject to quite a bit of written finger wagging from busy body feminists.  But he got the upper hand and by lefty standards, the moral high ground by posting a critique of said joke:

Smart Ass Friend:  “Not funny, what if the cashier had been a victim of sexual assault? Being subjected to the drawing could have been a triggering event for her PTSD. Not to mention the stomping on her civil rights if she was Lesbian or Transgendered, this kind of humor is perpetuated by the hegemonic phallocentric patriarchy that has committed all the evil in the world. I bet you Ted Nugent would have found this hilarious…I’m disappointed in you.”

Extra points for the use of your typical “Wymyn’s Studies” terminology, that’s used nowhere else and serves no useful descriptive purpose.  Therefore feminists love to use it.  So that was all it took to set his feminist friend (although probably by now his former friend) on a tear of foul language, and threats.  After that, all my friend had to do to egg on another tirade of butthurt was to toss in a few lines about a living wage, challenging hetronormative behaviors, gender binaries, and of course the “-isms.”  Leftists in general and feminists in particular love those; racism sexism capitalism, classism and so on.  The thing is, you don’t even have to use them in a coherent sentence, just list them.

The thread proceeds in a predictable manner, screaming incoherence from the feminist, and the arrival of a white knight to defend milady’s honor.  A white knight seems to be an accessory that every feminist needs since she’s incapable of using man tools like “logic” and “reason” herself.  She needs a big strong man to heft those.  Hey, you can’t fight the cisgendered, transphobic patriarchy without a fella can ya?  Am I right gals?

Of course, as dominate as it is in our culture, feminism is a stupid ideology.  It’s the idea that there are no differences between men and women other than genitalia, and now that trans-you-name-it is replacing homosexuality as the next civil rights frontier, genitalia are less and less important to one’s identity.  Even though the stupidity of feminism has become so obvious that now only 23% of women call themselves feminists, it’s still left a damaging mark on our culture.

Oddly enough, the same poll shows that 16% of men call themselves feminists too.

Lest anyone get the idea this is just some misogynic rant, I do support equal rights for women, and love and respect women.  My marriage isn’t about me bossing my wife around and tossing my shirts at her to make sure they get ironed.  It’s an equal partnership, meaning she bosses me around.

And my shirts never get ironed.

Arrogance of Trust

The news that Edward Snowden had somehow managed to persuade 20 to 25 of his fellow colleagues at the NSA to give up their passwords and login information has probably shocked IT professionals and corporate security types.  “What kind of slipshod IT security is the NSA running?”  Could the smartest guys in the room really be so dumb and trusting?  As Reuters reports:

Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.

This may seem incredible to those involved in information assurance that a system administrator, who had only been at the job a few months, could talk that many people out of their passwords.  Don’t these people have any information security training?  Every company IT department  teaches its employees to never share their password information.  Didn’t these guys have any training?

Headquarters of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. Español: Instalaciones generales de la NSA en Fort Meade, Maryland. Русский: Штаб-квартира АНБ, Форт-Мид, Мэриленд, США (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It turns out they do.  The Department of Defense, which the National Security Agency falls under, has extensive computer security training.  But that only begs the question further.  Snowden was so new at his base in Hawaii that he probably didn’t have any long term personal relationships to play on in order to trick people out of their passwords.  But I don’t think he needed to trick anyone.  And I think I know why.

I should preface this by saying this is just my personal opinion, but I think the popular idea of intelligence agencies and organizations, at least American ones, as a font of constant paranoia, looking over your shoulder at all times, and a lack of trust between co-workers, as depicted in movies and popular culture (think the Bourne movies) is totally opposite of the real situation.  I think the security problem in US intelligence organizations, which Snowden exploited, is that everyone trusts each other too much.

Security Clearances for Top Secret and above levels cost thousands of dollars and can take months to complete.  Once you have a security clearance, it’s not only a marketable item, but it’s sort of a short hand as to what kind of character you have.  Although it actually means you’ve mostly stayed out of trouble and have not screwed up too much, it’s taken as a certificate of approval that this person is trustworthy and of good character.  So if you work in a classified facility, surrounded by cleared people, some of them may strike you as crazy, or unpleasant, but not thieves, not crooks, and not traitors.  Why?  It’s nothing they did, it’s simply from the fact that they are working there; they’ve been vetted.

Once you are on the inside, you are part of special limited clique, in which everyone on the inside of the vault door holds secret knowledge that those on the other side of the vault door don’t know, and can’t know.  It’s like being part of Skull and Bones, only instead of knowing secret arcane nonsense; you know real things about the world that matter.  That dividing line between those on the inside of the door and those on the outside is huge.

One of the first things they teach you in Basic Training and Boot Camp is to keep you locker and money locked up and secure at all times. Even the camaraderie of military service isn’t enough to be sure your buddy won’t grab your wallet in an act of desperation. But like Singapore, if you decide to leave your wallet on your desk at work in your secured facility, you can mostly be assured that it will still be there, undisturbed, when you come back from break.  Having many roommates in the past with security clearances, I never worried for a second about leaving money or valuables around out in the open. I may have worried if they would clean up the kitchen after fixing dinner, or vanishing for days on end, but I never worried that they would steal from me.  I granted them an automatic level of trust that most keep within close family members.

And maybe that’s the problem.  In spite of all the security, and in spite of all the rules and security procedures, it doesn’t mean a thing unless people can operate with even a normal level of caution.  In my corporate environment I would never turn over my password to anyone, system administrator or otherwise.  But if I was back in the classified world, inside that insular level of trust, I can’t be sure how I would react.  And the fact that I would even question that is the problem.

Related articles

• Snowden Reportedly Used Others’ Login Info To Get Secret Data
• NSA Snowden Leaks Show Why Passwords Should Be Strictly Protected