Category: Uncategorized

The first ever Milblogging Conference in Washington, DC was a success with many prominent milbloggers highlighting the many positive aspects of the military blogging community:

Overregulation of military weblogs by the defense officials will not only demoralize troops but also silence many of the military’s strongest advocates, a panel of leading bloggers said Saturday.

There’s a growing gap between people who have no contact with the military and people who have contact every day,said Scott Koenig, better known as the blogger L.T. Smash. and one thing we can do (to counter that) is tell our story, and tell it effectively, and tell it intelligently.

However, milbloggers also have their critics who’s complaints are mostly OPSEC oriented:

But the blogging experts also warned that servicemembers and military families who use weblogs must be vigilant in what they post, because carelessness could easily enrage military leaders and possibly risk lives…………..
Last week, Pentagon officials announced the Defense Science Board, a 40-member body that advises the Pentagon on technical and other matters, will study a host of online tools, including blogs, to determine the challenges they present to military readiness and morale.

In addition, in the last year each of the four services has also issued its own directive on troops posting pictures and stories online.

The military has recently began mandatory OPSEC training for all unit leaders in order to educate military leaders on this new virtual battle ground in the War on Terror. Terrorists are monitoring websites run by US soldiers in order to track the effectiveness of their terrorist attacks, to learn US tactics, and to find out information in order to plot future terrorist attacks against US military targets. Here is a cartoon that highlights the danger very well:

I don’t think the terrorists are going to find any useful information off this site because everything I post is from public sources anyway. The people that cause problems are those who take pictures of the inside of military facilities or equipment for example. What concerns the military brass the most are those who post about tactics such as how the military counters IED’s in Iraq on their webpage which terrorists can in turn read and learn from in order to modify their own tactics.

This recent OPSEC training did give me the excuse I needed to change my banner on my site to include a disclaimer that the military now encourages bloggers to have on their site. Any comments on the new banner? Do any of you out there like this banner or should I go back to the old one? Or does anyone have a better suggestion for a banner?

By the way I did receive an online invite to participate in the conference this weekend but unfortunately I was to busy this weekend to participate but hopefully I can do so in the future. The conference does appear to have been a great success in promoting the milblogging community.

Uri Party advisor is bitching up a storm about getting denied a US visa:

Chyung Dai-chul, an advisor to the ruling Uri Party, had applied for a U.S. visa so he could take up a one-year position as an honorary researcher at Stanford University, but said his application was denied.

“I think there might be some reason for the U.S. to refuse me a visa,” Chyung told Yonhap News Agency.

He speculated that the “uncomfortable relationship” between South Korea and the U.S. prompted the embassy to deny his visa.

Ah, another CIA black helicopter conspiracy to explain why he did not get a US Visa.  I guess he figured this had nothing to do with it:

Chyung, who was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison on charges of bribery in 2004 related to a presidential election in 2002, was pardoned last year.

I’m happy the American government is keeping an ex-con out of the country and I would hope Korea is keeping criminals out their country as well.

I guess when you have 20 million soldiers in your standing army you can afford to be choosy:

China’s military is tightening its standards for recruiting potential officers as it adjusts to changing social trends, ordering drug and psychological tests, among other new requirements, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday, citing a military health official.

The People’s Liberation Army headquarters released the new recruitment rules Sunday, it said.

Recruits with fashionable tattoos will be barred from military schools, although traditional tattoos of ethnic minorities will be allowed if they are not too obvious when the recruit is wearing summer shorts, Li Chunming, the army health official, was cited as saying.

“Tattoos will tarnish the military’s image, even the scars of removed tattoos,” Li said.

Heavy snorers will also be banned, he said. The report did not say how the army would test for that problem.

Banning drugs I can undertand, but tatoos and snoring?  If the US Army banned tatoos and snoring half the army would be ineligible for service.

This study has concluded that Korea doesn’t size up very well against Japan in one critical area.  Korea can at least claim they have better sex lives than their Japanese counterparts:

Most Satisfied with Their Sex Lives

• Austria
• Spain
• Canada
• Belgium
• United States
• Australia
• Mexico
• Germany
• Sweden
• United Kingdom

Least Satisfied with Their Sex Lives

• Thailand
• China
• Indonesia
• Taiwan
• Japan

I guess this proves that size in fact doesn’t matter, in Asia at least.

(Hat Tip: Japundit)

It looks like the local police in Pyeongtaek are about as eager to enforce laws against illegal protesting as they are in enforcing Korean traffic laws:

Gyeonggi Provisional Police Agency Commissioner Oe Cheong-su on Thursday said police would reject a Defense Ministry request to provide security during the fencing in of the site for a new U.S. Forces Korea headquarters in Pyeongtaek. After plans for a ditch to keep residents and activists from farming the fields failed on April 7, the ministry said it would study setting up wire fences instead. “Under the Status of Forces Agreement, the police undertake security duty at protected military facilities like American bases. But there are no legal grounds for the police to do so in areas military facilities have yet to move to since they are property of the Defense Ministry,” Oe reasoned. “If the ministry is afraid of damage to the fences, it had better hire security contractors.?

I actually can’t blame the police for taking this stand considering the Korean government allows the anti-US hate groups and protesters to do this to them:

Scene of July 10, 2005 Riot Outside of Camp Humphreys

Maybe if the government would allow the police to arrest, imprison, and fine these people for assaulting policemen than maybe they would be more eager to do their jobs.

These students should be happy they were only expelled:

Korea University permanently expelled seven students on Wednesday as a penalty for detaining nine professors earlier this month.
Korea University is one of the top three universities of the country. In protest against the expulsions, about 100 students, including those who received the penalty, held a rally yesterday, cutting their hair.
In Korea, cutting one’s hair in public is a sign of strong protest.
On April 5, the students detained nine professors for about 17 hours on a stairway of a school building, calling for the university to grant students in the college of health science the right to vote in the students’ union.

They should have been charged with kidnapping or a similar charge.  If they would have just kidnapped and beaten some USFK soldiers and then forced them to make coerced statements on national television supporting their cause, they would have faced little or no punishment that way.

Here is an update of the case where a US soldier smashed a beer bottle over the head of a US contractor’s 18 year old daughter:

South Korea will not charge a soldier accused of smashing a broken bottle into a Seoul American High School student’s face in an off-base nightclub district, a Seoul prosecutor said Thursday.

Pfc. Christopher Myers, 20, still faces aggravated assault charges brought by U.S. Forces Korea in connection with an attack on Jasmyn Chambers, 18, outside an off-limits nightclub in the Hongdae District on Feb. 25.

He decided that USFK would exercise jurisdiction?over the case, said Kweon Jung-hun of the Seoul Sebu District Prosecutors Office.

Chambers father contends the decision to turn down the case may make it more difficult for his daughter to recover medical costs or any punitive damages.

What the father is referring to is that in the Korean system of justice “blood” money can be given to the victim in order to drop charges.  With the Koreans passing on the jurisdiction of this case to USFK that means this guy will get slammed to the maximum with UCMJ which will probably mean reduction to E1, loss of money, and possible imprisonment, but it does not necessarily mean that the victim will be compensated.  So this was definitely a turn for the worse for the victim’s family.

Thankfully it looks like President Bush is going to continue to pressure the Chinese over the deportation of North Korean defectors:

President George W. Bush is expected to make a statement on human rights conditions in North Korea in his meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao on Thursday. He is tipped to cite the case of a woman using the alias Kim Chun-hee, who recently escaped North Korea only to be forcibly repatriated by Beijing, according to the Washington Post. Various activist groups that have descended on Washington for the “North Korea Freedom Week” plan to hold an all-night protest against the repatriations on April 28 in front of the Chinese Embassy.

Now if only the South Koreans would get on board too.

To their credit the South Koreans are currently wrapped up in the greatest security threat the country has seen since the Hideyoshi invasion of 1592 with the current Japanese invasion plan to claim the Dokdo isles. With pressing security threats like this who can blame them for not caring about North Korean defectors.

This guy is so dumb I wonder if the Korean courts will just give him a slap on the hand sentence like they usuall do for sex offenders?:

Seoul Jungbu police on Thursday asked for an arrest warrant for a man identified a Lee for sexually assaulting and robbing his next-door neighbor. Lee allegedly took a key the victim had inadvertently left in her front door at the beginning of the month, and April 7 at around 2 a.m. let himself in to rape the woman and steal valuables from her home. The victim was able to get a look at the man?s face, but she failed to identify him as the neighbor whom she had seen only once.

However, Lee was apparently so enamored of his victim that he started leaving text messages on her phone. ?You are like an angel,? one read. ?Tonight I just want to sleep beside you, then I?ll go,? read another. The third was a dead giveaway: ?Leave me a message in the apartment mailbox.?

Police reviewed security camera footage but were unable to find any unfamiliar faces coming or going at the apartment. To catch the rapist, they left a note in the mailbox that read, ?Come and play.? Lee promptly went back to the scene of his crime at 11:40 p.m. the following Saturday to find a female detective waiting to take him into custody.

Courtesy of Japundit, here is the trailer of the latest version of Memoirs of a Geisha that you probably won’t see hitting a theater near you anytime soon: