Latest Military Talk Posts at VideoSift.com

My Review of Inglourious Basterds

Fusionaut (http://fusionaut.videosift.com) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 07:37:49 -0700

(8 comments - 253 views)
It's Bad-Ass

- Fusionaut

Military Spending Worldwide

poolcleaner (http://military.videosift.com/member/poolcleaner) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:41:55 -0700

(4 comments - 320 views)
Neat little image at http://www.visualeconomics.com/military-spending-worldwide/

- poolcleaner

What is happening in Iran?

Crake (http://military.videosift.com/member/Crake) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:34:40 -0700

(10 comments - 566 views)
Is it a revolution? Or just hype on twitter? Any news junkies on the sift wanna update us?

[small update]

Some of the (few!) media outlets reporting on the protests:

http://www.memeorandum.com/
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/

Also, pajamasmedia has a list of the various crackdowns Ahmadinejad has made on the protests.

- Crake

Frontline's "Digital Nation"

griefer_queafer (http://grieferqueafer.videosift.com) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:39:10 -0700

(1 comment - 393 views)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

So this is my first post on sift talk, and I thought I would try and wait until I had something that I suspect would interest most of you. If you haven't seen it already, PBS and Frontline are putting together a pretty fascinating online series of documentaries centered around the idea that what will ultimately define our age is digital technology.

Frontline has done some docs like this one before, but this one is particularly cool because its content and its primary mode of exhibition are married.

So far they have released two "chapters." I guess they are going by country, because part one deals with Korea... specifically with video games and video game/internet addiction. The second chapter deals with America's emergent robotic military.

The other thing I wanted to bring up is actually a question for the veteran sifters and I guess Dag specifically. PBS video has embed codes; is it possible to post these? I couldn't get it to work. ;(

Cheers!

- griefer_queafer

The Crusade for a Christian US Military

Farhad2000 (http://farhad.videosift.com) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:20:10 -0700

(2 comments - 847 views)
An extract from "Jesus Killed Mohammed" http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488

As a whole, the military is actually slightly less religious than the general population: 20 percent of the roughly 1.4 million active-duty personnel checked off a box for a 2008 Department of Defense survey that says “no religious preference,” compared with the 16.1 percent of Americans who describe themselves as “unaffiliated.” These ambivalent soldiers should not be confused with the actively irreligious, though. Only half of one percent of the military accepts the label “atheist” or “agnostic.” (Jews are even scarcer, accounting for only one servicemember in three hundred; Muslims are just one in four hundred.) Around 22 percent, meanwhile, identify themselves as affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. But that number is misleading. It leaves out those attached to the traditional mainline denominations—about 7 percent of the military—who describe themselves as evangelical; George W. Bush, for instance, is a Methodist. Among the 19 percent of military members who are Roman Catholics, meanwhile, there is a small but vocal subset who tend politically to affiliate with conservative evangelicals. And then there is the 20 percent of the military who describe themselves simply as “Christian,” a category that encompasses both those who give God little thought and the many evangelicals who reject denominational affiliation as divisive of the Body of Christ. “I don’t like ‘religion,’” a fundamentalist evangelical major told me. “That’s what put my savior on the cross. The Pharisees.”

Within the fundamentalist front in the officer corps, the best organized group is Officers’ Christian Fellowship, with 15,000 members active at 80 percent of military bases and an annual growth rate, in recent years, of 3 percent. Founded during World War II, OCF was for most of its history concerned mainly with the spiritual lives of those who sought it out, but since 9/11 it has moved in a more militant direction. According to the group’s current executive director, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, the “global war on terror”—to which Obama has committed 17,000 new troops in Afghanistan—is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” As jihad has come to connote violence, so spiritual war has moved closer to actual conflict, “continually confronting an implacable, powerful foe who hates us and eagerly seeks to destroy us,” declares “The Source of Combat Readiness,” an OCF Scripture study prepared on the eve of the Iraq War.

But another OCF Bible study, “Mission Accomplished,” warns that victory abroad does not mean the war is won at home. “If Satan cannot succeed with threats from the outside, he will seek to destroy from within,” asserts the study, a reference to “fellow countrymen” both in biblical times and today who practice “spiritual adultery.” “Mission Accomplished” takes as its text Nehemiah 1–6, the story of the “wallbuilder” who rebuilt the fortifications around Jerusalem. An outsider might misinterpret the wall metaphor as a sign of respect for separation of church and state, but in contemporary fundamentalist thinking the story stands for just the opposite: a wall within which church and state are one. “With the wall completed the people could live an integrated life,” the study argues. “God was to be Lord of all or not Lord at all.” So it is today, “Mission Accomplished” continues, proposing that before military Christians can complete their wall, they must bring this “Lord of all” to the entire armed forces. “We will need to press ahead obediently,” the study concludes, “not allowing the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, to keep us from the mission of reclaiming territory for Christ in the military.”

- Farhad2000

Chinese Ninja Dolphins versus Pirates

poolcleaner (http://military.videosift.com/member/poolcleaner) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:36:21 -0700

(1 comment - 558 views)
I'm not one for lengthy discourse, so -- BWAH:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/14/content_11184581.htm

If I ever meet a dolphin I will make graven images and worship it.

What do you guys think of the actions made by these thousands of dolphins? I think I'd like to join their ranks and leave the human world behind, yes. Yes.

Yeah.

- poolcleaner

Air Force Probe Clears Colonel....

Duckman33 (http://duckman33.videosift.com) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:05:28 -0700

(3 comments - 1000 views)
in Religious E-Mail Dissemination Case

http://digg.com/d1nkTk

By Jason Leopold

This story was updated Thursday afternoon based on a report stating that the Air Force concluded its investigation.

An Air Force investigation has found that a colonel who sent an e-mail to thousands of airmen in Europe directing them to visit a far-right, Catholic website, where President Barack Obama was compared to Adolf Hitler and the Antichrist, did not violate the military’s position on religious neutrality, according to a report published Thursday in Stars and Stripes.

In February, The Public Record broke the story about a Jan. 16 e-mail Air Force Col. Kimberly K. Toney, commander of the 501st Combat Support Wing at RAF Alconbury, sent to eight different Air Force installations in the United Kingdom and Norway which included the subject line: “Inspiration of the day - A Giant of a Man - Meet Nick Vujicic,” who was born without limbs.

“Every day, all around us, we meet people who make a difference in our lives,” said Col. Toney’s e-mail that directed personnel to the website 4marks.com. “Please take a few minutes to enjoy the attached video and meet a truly inspirational individual who will provide you with an opportunity to think about life and how we handle challenges in our personal and professional day-to-day lives. Keep doing the GREAT things you do and don't ever let the challenges get you down. Live, learn and enjoy! Thank you!”

The electronic communication pointed Air Force personnel toward a five-minute video clip about 25 year-old Vujicic whose story of hope and courage is rife with religious overtones. A synopsis of the video says, “God has given [Vujicic] the strength to surmount what others might call impossible. Along with that, the Lord has placed within him an unquenchable passion to share this same hope and genuine love that he's personally experienced with more than two million people all over the globe."

Using official government e-mail to endorse religion is a violation of longstanding military rules and regulations and the U.S. Constitution's 1st Amendment and Clause 3, Article 6 of the body of the Constitution completely prohibiting any "religious test.”

The New York Times followed up on the The Public Record’s Feb. 5 exclusive and reported last month that the Air Force opened a formal inquiry into the matter.

“The purpose of this process is to look at all of the information and make a determination as to whether there’s been any sort of violation of policy and, if so, what action is warranted,” Darlene Cowsert, a spokeswoman for the Air Force’s European command, told The New York Times.

On Monday, Stars and Stripes reported, the Air Force concluded its probe and found that Col. Toney acted inadvertently and unintentionally and did not willfully violate Air Force policy or (Equal Employment Opportunity) guidelines," according Lt. Col. Dave Honchul, 3rd Air Force’s director of public affairs.

The investigation, officially was referred to as an "equal opportunity treatment incident clarification."

"Lt. Gen. Philip Breedlove, Third Air Force commander, agreed with the findings of the EOTI, has taken appropriate action and considers the case closed, Honchul said. When asked what appropriate action was taken, Honchul did not offer specifics, citing privacy concerns," Stars and Stripes reported.

But one of the e-mail’s recipients, Master Sergeant Jeffrey L. Thompson, who said Col. Toney’s e-mail smacked of illegal proselytizing and was "hostile to our commander-in-chief" was blocked from filing a formal complaint by his superior.

MSgt. Thompson, who said he is a Roman Catholic, was told by an official with the Military Equal Opportunity office (MEO) in January that Col. Toney’s e-mail was not intended to come across as proselytizing and because he did not personally endure any suffering as a result of her widely distributed e-mail and therefore was prevented from filing a formal complaint.

But Mikey Weinstein, the founder and president of the watchdog group the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, predicted last month in an interview that the Air Force “investigation” would be a “sham.”

“What we’re faced with here is a fundamentalist Christian para-church –military-corporate-proselytizing-complex,” Weinstein said in an interview. “It is far easier to find 'happy clients' of Bernie Madoff than it is to find American servicemen and women who've been able to successfully solve the profound institutional command bias in order to even lodge complaints of unconstitutional religious intolerance within the Department of Defense. The Air Force should be ignominiously ashamed of itself and heads should roll.”

Weinstein said the “unconstitutional religious oppression is so out of control in the Department of Defense that MRFF is proposing publicly for the very first time that all Defense Department personnel be immediately required to swear out an additional oath besides the one they all swear to protect and defend the Constitution: "The Oath of Equal Character."

On Feb. 9, four days after The Public Record broke the story, Col. Toney apologized for disseminating the e-mail. She said she was unaware that the website she directed the 3,000 or so military personnel to visit contained offensive content.

"I recently sent an e-mail to our 501st Team that contained a link to what I believed was an inspirational message about hope and encouragement," Toney wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail obtained by The Public Record. "Regrettably, I was unaware at the time that the Web site hosting this link contains information and links to information, the content of which is inappropriate. I sincerely apologize for this oversight, especially to those individuals who may have been offended, and want to ensure all are aware that my intent was solely to provide a tool that might offer beneficial insight toward overcoming adversity."

- Duckman33

Stuck Here Forever

campionidelmondo (http://military.videosift.com/member/campionidelmondo) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 06:35:03 -0800

(9 comments - 838 views)

From: Superpoop.com

- campionidelmondo

US Military warns of possible sudden collapse of Mexico

cdominus (http://military.videosift.com/member/cdominus) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:12:01 -0800

(10 comments - 822 views)
There is a war going on just across the border and it gets hardly any air time in the MSM. In Juarez, Mexico just across the border from El Paso, TX over 1600 people were murdered last year. I have family in El Paso and New Mexico so this really hits home.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/newupdated/ci_11444354

- cdominus

Siftquisition #3: My rights violated!

CaptainPlanet420 (http://military.videosift.com/member/CaptainPlanet420) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:11:35 -0800

(36 comments - 1298 views)
It has come to my attention that someone who will remain nameless has gone into my comment history and summarily marked my most recent 5 pages or so as "spam." This is a violation of my rights as a loyal videosift contributor, as I have over 50 sifted videos. This is downright unacceptable and hateful.

I think the authorities should look into this, since we all know choggie was banned for similar actions. I frequently downvote comments based on political differences, but do so based on the comment itself.

My comments have been on my own sift talk posts, on peoples profiles and other places this person had no business disgracing my comments.

Thank you.

- CaptainPlanet420