Fog of First Responders

The most frequent comment these days on CNN Breaking News may well be "the first reports are usually wrong."

There are a number of news stories about recent police shootings.  The Cincinnati one has resulted in a campus police officer being charged with murder.

Col. Alan D. Campen, USAF (ret) wrote about the "Fog of War" in Signal Magazine several years ago.  A Google search will identify several articles in Signal.

Wikipedia currently has an entry on the Fog of War.  It says:

The fog of war (German: Nebel des Krieges) is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in in military operations.  The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign. Military forces try to reduce the fog of war through military intelligence.

The Wikipedia entry defines this for five (5) Levels:

1.  Grand strategic
2.  Military strategiv
3.  Operational
4.  Tactical
5.  Emotion/Computational

The Tactical Level entry states:

"Ambiguity stems from several factors at the tactical level, both by deliberate means by the enemy (including active deception and/or electronic attack on communications and sensors) as well as factors inherent to battle resulting in lack of comprehension by commanders as to the tactical environment, the logistic status of their own units, how they are interacting with each other, or their intentions. This lack of comprehension can stem from many factors, individually or in combination, such as poor reconnaissance; inaccurate intelligence; or faulty communication. The tempo of decision making at the tactical level is much greater than at other levels, increasing the risk of escalating ambiguity as assumptions build and resources are allocated based on those assumptions."

A former SEAL, described the First Responder arrival at the Navy Yard in July 2015, in Washington, DC, as "everybody show up".

The Fog of War at the Tactical Level is experience by First Responders.  When a policeman interacts with the community, there is a risk of the situation escalating and "getting out of control," if not "out of hand."

Since the O. J. Simpson case, all liberals have been concerned about Domestic Violence.  My personal observations indicate that this has led to serious abuse of 911 calls.  I was present when my ex-spouse called 911 reporting that someone was "breaking in."  Fortunately for me, there was a third person present.

My ex-spouse has not been punished for abusing 911.  She should be.

Every 911 call exposes the First Responder to a situation which is similar to the Fog of War.

I guess I need to hire Gloria Allred.

The Flag of the United States of America

The Flag Code is viewable at http://www.usflag.org/uscode36.html from which the following was extracted today July 3, 2015,

"Previous to Flag Day, June 14, 1923 there were no federal or state regulations governing display of the United States Flag. It was on this date that the National Flag Code was adopted by the National Flag Conference which was attended by representatives of the Army and Navy which had evolved their own procedures, and some 66 other national groups. This purpose of providing guidance based on the Army and Navy procedures relating to display and associated questions about the U. S. Flag was adopted by all organizations in attendance.

"A few minor changes were made a year later during the Flag Day 1924 Conference, It was not until June 22, 1942 that Congress passed a joint resolution which was amended on December 22, 1942 to become Public Law 829; Chapter 806, 77th Congress, 2nd session. Exact rules for use and display of the flag (36 U.S.C. 173-178) as well as associated sections (36 U.S.C. 171) Conduct during Playing of the National Anthem, (36 U.S.C. 172) the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and Manner of Delivery were included.

"This code is the guide for all handling and display of the Stars and Stripes. It does not impose penalties for misuse of the United States Flag. That is left to the states and to the federal government for the District of Columbia. Each state has its own flag law.

"Criminal penalties for certain acts of desecration to the flag were contained in Title 18 of the United States Code prior to 1989. The Supreme Court decision in Texas v. Johnson; June 21, 1989, held the statute unconstitutional. This statute was amended when the Flag Protection Act of 1989 (Oct. 28, 1989) imposed a fine and/or up to I year in prison for knowingly mutilating, defacing, physically defiling, maintaining on the floor or trampling upon any flag of the United States. The Flag Protection Act of 1989 was struck down by the Supreme Court decision, United States vs. Eichman, decided on June 11, 1990.

"While the Code empowers the President of the United States to alter, modify, repeal or prescribe additional rules regarding the Flag, no federal agency has the authority to issue 'official' rulings legally binding on civilians or civilian groups. Consequently, different interpretations of various provisions of the Code may continue to be made. The Flag Code may be fairly tested: 'No disrespect should be shown to the Flag of the United States of America.' Therefore, actions not specifically included in the Code may be deemed acceptable as long as proper respect is shown."

All the above changes after 1942 happened while I was in the Washington, DC, area, a very protocol conscious area.  

The Great Awakenings

The problem with Great Awakenings is that there is another on the way in less than 100 years.

 

1.  First Great Awakening

 

The First Great Awakening began in the 1730s and lasted to about 1743, though pockets of revivalism had occurred in years prior, especially amongst the ministry of Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards's grandfather

 

2.  Second Great Awakening

 

The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival that occurred in the United States beginning in the late eighteenth century and lasting until the middle of the nineteenth century. While it occurred in all parts of the United States, it was especially strong in the Northeast and the Midwest. This awakening was unique in that it moved beyond the educated elite of New England to those who were less wealthy and less educated. The center of revivalism was the so-called Burned-over district in western New York. Named for its overabundance of hellfire-and-damnation preaching, the region produced dozens of new denominations, communal societies, and reform.

 

3.  Third Great Awakening

 

The Third Great Awakening in the 1850s–1900s was characterized by new denominations, active missionary work, Chautauquas, and the Social Gospel approach to social issues.^[7]  The Y.M.C.A. (founded in 1844) played a major role in fostering revivals in the cities in the 1858 Awakening and after. The revival of 1858 produced the leadership, such as that of Dwight L. Moody, out of which came religious work carried on in the armies during the civil war. 

 

The Christian and Sanitary Commissions and numerous Freedmen's Societies were also formed in the midst of the War.

 

4.  Fourth Great Awakening

 

The Fourth Great Awakening has not received the acceptance of the first three. Advocates such as economist Robert Fogel say it happened in the late 1960s and early1970s. Others call this the Charismatic Movement. Some of the ministers of the Charismatic Movement were Kenneth Hagin, Chuck Smith,John Wimber, and Kathryn Kuhlman. The Vineyard Movement and Calvary Chapel emerged during this movement. Both these movements still exist. Expository teaching along with the Signs and Wonders movement emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Mainline Protestant denominations weakened sharply in both membership and influence while the most conservative religious denominations (such as the Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans) grew rapidly in numbers, spread across the United States, had grave internal theological battles and schisms, and became politically powerful. Most of these organizations still stand today.

 

5.  Fifth Great Awakening

 

This Awakening Consisted of Two Major Revivals: The Toronto Blessing and The Brownsville Revival.

The Toronto Blessing describes the revival and resulting phenomena that began in January 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard church, now the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship (TACF), a neo-charismatic evangelical Christian church located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Participants in the conferences and meetings sponsored by TACF have reported healings, incidents of personal transformation and a greater awareness of God's love. It has also been referred to as the Father's blessing, the Anointing, the Awakening, the Renewal, the River and the Fire. The blessing has become known for ecstatic worship, including what is known as falling or resting in the Spirit, laughter, shaking, and crying. "Holy laughter" was a hallmark manifestation, and there were also instances of participants roaring like lions. Another "manifestation of the spirit" encountered at these meetings was a gesture commonly called "crunching" consisting of a vomit-like heaving as a reaction to inviting God to "cleanse" one's emotions or releasing forgiveness to those involved in past negative experiences. Leaders and participants claim that these are physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit's presence and power. One TACF teaching, the Golden Sword prophecy, has been spreading among charismatic churches.

The Brownsville Revival (also known as the Pensacola Outpouring) was a widely reported Christian revival within the Pentecostal Movement that began on Father's Day June 18, 1995, at Brownsville Assembly of God (a church in the Assemblies of God) in Pensacola, Florida.  Characteristics of the Brownsville Revival movement, as with other Christian religious revivals, included acts of repentance by parishioners and a call to holiness, said to be inspired by the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Some of the occurrences in this revival fit the description of moments of religious ecstasy. More than four million people are reported to have attended the revival meetings from its beginnings in 1995 to around 2000.

I have borrowed heavily from the Wikipedia entry on Great Awakenings

The Collapse of the Grand Narrative

Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard's work is characterized by a persistent opposition to universals, meta-narratives, and generality. He is fiercely critical of many of the 'universalist' claims of the Enlightenment, and several of his works serve to undermine the fundamental principles that generate these broad claims. Most famously, in La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979), he argued that our age (with its postmodern condition) is marked by an 'incredulity towards meta-narratives'. These meta-narratives - sometimes 'grand narratives' - are grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world, such as the progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom. Lyotard argues that we have ceased to believe that narratives of this kind are adequate to represent and contain us all. We have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and for that reason postmodernity is characterised by an abundance of micronarratives. For this concept Lyotard draws on and strongly reinterprets the notion of 'language-games' found in the work of Wittgenstein.

In Lyotard's works, the term 'language games', sometimes also called 'phrase regimens', denotes the multiplicity of communities of meaning, the innumerable and incommensurable separate systems in which meanings are produced and rules for their circulation are created.

This becomes more crucial in Au juste: Conversations (Just Gaming) (1979) and Le Différend (The Differend) (1983), which develop a postmodern theory of justice. It might appear that the atomisation of human beings implied by the notion of the micronarrative and the language game suggests a collapse of ethics. It has often been thought that universality is a condition for something to be a properly ethical statement: 'thou shalt not steal' is an ethical statement in a way that 'thou shalt not steal from Margaret' is not. The latter is too particular to be an ethical statement (what's so special about Margaret?); it is only ethical if it rests on a universal statement ('thou shalt not steal from anyone'). But universals are impermissible in a world that has lost faith in metanarratives, and so it would seem that ethics is impossible. Justice and injustice can only be terms within language games, and the universality of ethics is out of the window. Lyotard argues that notions of justice and injustice do in fact remain in postmodernism. The new definition of injustice is indeed to use the language rules from one 'phrase regimen' and apply them to another. Ethical behaviour is about remaining alert precisely to the threat of this injustice, of paying attention to things in their particularity and not enclosing them within abstract conceptuality. One must bear witness to the 'differend'.

DR2H

Obama's Way is a 30 year program

The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling was a bipartisan presidential commission, established by Executive Order 13543 signed by Barack Obama on May 21, 2010, that was “tasked with providing recommendations on how the United States can prevent and mitigate the impact of any future spills that result from offshore drilling.”

This commission got the wrong answer.  We never heard about the results.  A description is available on Wikipedia.

Constitutional lawyer Barack Obama as the recently elected President of the United States of America rapidly surmised that BP was the responsible party.

The US Government has established a 30 year program described in http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18962/gulf-research-program-a-strategic-vision .

PV=nRT

The ideal gas law.  Seems nothing is ideal since Obama first got elected.

The ideal gas law says that the pressure P times the volume V is equal to n the number of moles of gas contained in the volume times the universal gas constant R times the temperature T.

T is the temperature above absolute zero.  P is the absolute pressure.  The absolute pressure is the gauge pressure plus atmospheric pressure.  I recall 1 standard atmospheric pressure to be 14.7 pounds per square inch.

Most solids, liquids, and gases expand with increasing temperature and contract with decreasing temperature.

Typically, gases expand(contract) more(less) than liquids which expand(contract) more than solids with increasing(decreasing) temperature.

In brief, both the leather of the football and the air in it should expand with temperature and contract with decreasing temperature.

Physicists usually consider the simplest model first.  The simplest model is that the ideal gas law holds and that the only material affected by the temperature is the gas inside the football.

This model will assume that n and V are constant.

Any decrease in temperature will cause a ball inflated to 12.5 lbs/sqin to be outside the official range.

One atmosphere is 14.7 lbs/in**2.  A minimally inflated ball should have an actual pressure of 27.2 lbs/sqin.

The temperature in Rankine is the temperature in Fahrenheit plus 459.67. 

P2ndhalf =( P@inpection+14.7)* T2ndhalf/T@imspection.-14.7

Assume room temperature is 72 degrees F and the temperature at the beginning of the 2nd half was 51 degrees F.

Under these conditions, the pressure at the beginning of the 2nd half would be 11.43 lbs/sqin.

DR2H

Counter Terrorism

Benjamin Netanyahu was the first to exploit George W. Bush's counter-terrorism definition.  Joe Biden has assisted BO in exploiting it much more.

Just following Orders was not adequate defense for the Nazis.
 
In the best of all worlds, Dick Cheney would not have prodded George W. into invading Iraq.  George W. Bush was/is a "born again" Christian.  He and Tony Blair shared some vision/fear of the Moslem Hordes.  Norman Podaretz, founder of Commentary, came around to the position that the Arab - Israeli peace process was "fatally flawed".

Religious fundamentalists do not get along with each other very well.  I found the book Stealing Jesus to be informative and accurate.  I belong to a people of the Book.  My brother is a retired Methodist minister.  My father-in-law is a retired Methodist minister.  I used to have Jewish neighbors and I have led a Sunday School Class in Florida.  We shared the presentation responsibilities.  I gave the presentations of Islam, twice.

Bush's wetback Attorney General was the one who decided it is OK for us to torture.  Until this guy, the answer to the "hypothetical" was, in Hugo Black's words "Of course we would but we can never say that!"  My view is that we should have to rely on a trial by peers to show us mercy.