The Devil You Say?

Did you know that Jews and Christians are the Devil? No really see the Muslims have figured it all out.

Wowzers!
This kind of thing reminds me of the Waterboy.

If You Want It You Must Fight For It

So since I’m a terrorism and technology blog I thought I share some of my feelings about the coming crisis with the Comprehensive Medical Reform Bill aka Obamacare.

So to shed some light on where I’m coming from I’ll tell you more about myself. I am an Army vet I spent a few years in and then got out for personal reasons. I enjoyed my time while I was in and I enjoyed my job. I did Intelligence work; gathering intel and processing it. While I was in I knew a guy, not real well, but I worked with him and I liked him. He like I volunteered to go over to a theater of operation and unlike me he was accepted. This guy wasn’t there for a few weeks and he got hit by a mortar round in the green zone. Shit happens, its war.

What bothered me about the situation is not so much that he got hurt it was the extent of his injuries. You see he lost an eye, most of his right leg and arm. He lost a portion of his left leg and part of his left hand. For a military guy he was pretty much done when it comes to his career. I know there a few that get back up and continue their service but this guy was not going to see that. Now I’m not bothered by his injures because he is maimed and disfigured in fact that hardly bothers me. No, what bothered me is the shear uselessness of our prosthetics.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got out of high school which is why I didn’t go straight to college. I joined the Army so I would be a productive member of society and have time to think about what I wanted to do as well as have money for college when I got out. It was the non-advanced prosthetics our people had available to them and my want to make them better that I went out to school to become and Engineer.

I wanted to do prosthetics so I needed to have some medical background mainly the basics as well as some electrical and mechanical engineering studies. So I went the route of becoming and Biomedical Electrical Engineer. I have a few classes more to finish a degree and then I want to get to work.

I’ve been doing a lot of studying on companies to work for and aside from DARPA groups there are not too many companies that actual work in this field which explains the lack of quality prosthetics out there. So I decided about a year or so ago that I would go to work for a few years in industry then start a research company.

Well In the last year a great deal has happened today we have the financial regulatory overhaul that I have no doubt will screw over young entrepreneurs, but we also have the ever so wonderful Obamacare. The medical field is going to change and the bill already affects research specifically in the field I wish to work in.
The interesting thing is the increase in research money that has been devoted to my field of research. However, the research money that has been allocated is not for research in new technologies. The research money has been set aside for Comparative Effectiveness studies.

Comparative Effectiveness is defined by the AHRQ as “research [that] is designed to inform health-care decisions by providing evidence on the effectiveness, benefits, and harms of different treatment options. The evidence is generated from research studies that compare drugs, medical devices, tests, surgeries, or ways to deliver health care.

In other words it is designed to find the cheapest route but not necessarily the most effective route. This is of course how comparative effectiveness has been used in every country that employs a nationalized health care.

The problem with this is that new technologies are only expected to be developed so long as they can produce a cheaper alternative to what is out there not necessarily a healthier lifestyle for the patient. This is why the healthcare bill hurts the field I wish to go into. The tools employed will be more expensive than a faux arm with a hook attached to a lingering muscle ligament. I have no problem that my field of study is vastly more adaptive to the situation at hand but I want to do what I want to do and the healthcare bill has more than likely killed my dream.
If reality could only match the idealness of this bill. Alas, I have no delusions about the future and grim dreary landscape it holds. I also cannot accept that all is well when history has shown time and time again that Statist Healthcare systems do not care about the well being of the patient only about the bottom line. Research will be stymied as well as it has in all the rest of the countries with Nationalized Healthcare and the prospects of healthcare getting better and cheaper will no longer exist.

I am not resigned to this grim future. I will do everything possible to fight it. It is not about me but about the men and women who have served us and my want to serve them in return. I will not go silently into the night while the my field burns in flames set by the agressors.

Bending the truth or lieing as its known

So I was perusing the interwebs and spending time pretending to be someone I'm not and came across this.

This post on facebook by the Muslim Ummah:


This is actual fabrication of what is going on. The troops are not being turned back they are finding better cover as they are out in the open without any concealment. In the video below you can see.



Now you can see that the troops are as I said out in the open. What to do if you're a soldier in that situation. Well they do what's tactically sound. Due to the distance the enemy is away from them they don't charge the ambush they pop smoke to conceal themselves and their movement. Then the video leaves off with them on the move. I'm betting shortly thereafter an Apache or predator came in but I haven't researched that far yet.

The point of this exercise is to show the lengths the enemy will distort the truth in order to push their propaganda war. Since there is no narrative to what is going on anything the enemy says is happening they could probably get away with. Anyone already in the mindset will continue to use this news footage as propaganda.

Continuance of Online Terrorism

I've been spending more of my free time doing sort what I did while in the Army. Gathering intelligence. I've done what my enemy does and created sleepers within their community to find and collect information and to discern disinformation from that which is credible. What makes this harder than my previous job is that the enemy speaks far more languages and dialects within them than I have learned. However since many followers within this group share this "inadequacy" there are those within the group that translate into other languages that are readily understood by myself and of course their target audience.

Social Networks and video sharing sites contain pools of knowledge that many overlook. Since the enemy we fight are not united under a specific banner outwardly and are not centrally located it makes them harder to pinpoint while walking around in day to day life. Most do not spout their true beliefs outwardly fearing possible backlash from the authorities. On the aforementioned sites the enemy is free to speak openly about their beliefs and hide behind anonymity. The internet provides a great deal of protection for those who do not wish to be known. I don't begrudge it that afterall I would use it too if it were necessary. The internet does not provide iron clad wall for anonymity, especially for the enemy.

Since the enemy chooses to use the internet for its propaganda, and we do not (and should not) live in a police state, it is necessary for private citizens and private groups to intervene. This is where groups like The Jawa Report, The Youtube Smackdown Corps, and others like them come in. The Jawa Report and its cadre have been doing great work in taking down enemies from within as well as engaging in international cases that led to the conviction of a terrorist in another country. The Smackdown Corps has been exceptionally useful in removing propaganda from youtube. They are alerted or find enemy propaganda and through the help of its members (including yours truly) flag and report said videos. Usually ending in the deletion of the video or the user account.

The citzenry are the militia and are the last line of defense in a shooting war. However in a war like this the citizenry are the first line of defense as they are everywhere and can see everything the trick is opening our eyes.