Things that were not immediately obvious to me

I don’t much like the Internet’s efforts to serve up relevant advertising to me. It’s creepy enough when, after I visit a company’s website to look at their products, I’m deluged with their ads from every website I visit for weeks thereafter, but it’s the monotony of the thing that really gets me down. If I visit a UK website, I don’t want to see another bloody ad from Meg Whitman’s insufferable gubernatorial campaign — I want to see ads for tea, or umbrellas, or PSAs condemning soccer hooliganism. Something different.

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I want to make some brief remarks as to my overall reaction to Chapter 1 of FM 3-24 — the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency (COIN) field manual — before moving on to Chapter 2. This isn’t a summary of the chapter (as the FM is essentially pre-summarized), nor a catalog of everything I found noteworthy (that’s contained in the previous — ugh — 10 posts), but rather a description of my strongest subjective impressions.

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“Send immediately: Lawyers, guns, and money.”

With apologies to Warren Zevon. It’s actually not a bad shopping list for an insurgent: Lawyers to restrict the actions of COIN forces, guns to attack the civil society, and money to propagandize the populace.

Concluding our review of Chapter 1 of FM 3-24 — the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency (COIN) field manual — we come to a discussion of the “paradoxes of counterinsurgency operations” and a summary table of “successful and unsuccessful counterinsurgency operational practices”.

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Apparently, I will be on vacation this week. (Well, vacation from the blog, anyway. I’ve been coming up to speed on Django and WSGI configuration.) Posting will resume on 30 August.

In the meantime, perhaps you might enjoy these re-runs:

• Organization
• Six Word Stories: 11-99
• DC: Recap
• 99.999999999%
• Probability
• Six Word Stories: Virus
• The Facts

From the 18 August 2010 edition of Roger Ebert’s “Answer Man” letters column:

Q. I have watched and read your reviews for years with great honor. I disagree so strongly with your review of “Eat Pray Love” that it makes me sick. You just don’t get it, and many others like you don’t get it. You do not know at all what it is like being a woman in this day and age (or previously) who did not want to be defined by a man or married off to one. If you think Stephen in the movie was an OK husband, you are out to lunch. He was horrible!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (except on paper to people who do not need emotional sustenance). David was the narcissist from hell that many of us have fallen for… do you not get that??????????? Many of the males of the species are frankly overrated and the women’s movement has proven this (or frankly not sufficiently). I hope your wife will bring you up to speed. (Jeanine Carlson, Ph.D., Licensed Clinical Psychologist)

Ph.D.

Licensed Clinical Psychologist.

Oh dear.

Now, it’s the Internet, so who knows. FWIW, there is a Jeanine Carlson with these credentials in Falls Church, VA. If she didn’t write this, I pity her. If she did … hoo boy.

The talking gorillas were dreadful conversationalists.

Today we’re going to finish updating the Demine project for the iOS 4.0 environment by adding complete support for multitasking. Even though Demine is not going to be doing any background processing, it turns out that a multitasking environment mandates certain changes to the program; some we saw last week, and the balance we’ll see now.

(We’ll be making changes to the project as we left it last week; you can download the final version here.)

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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a “dull boy”. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

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Continuing with our review of Chapter 1 of FM 3-24 — the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency (COIN) field manual — we now look at the FM’s “Contemporary Imperatives of Counterinsurgency”: i.e., more stuff to consider, that’s (presumably) only come to light recently.

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