(c) Lily aged 4

A new release by ‘Lily aged 4’. displaying exceptional use of colour with clear direct and subliminal imagery which gets her message across in manner which is crisp, concise and to the point…it’s a pity that we can not expect the same from the socalled professional media…

Michael yon yanks Time’s tail for if not directly telling porkies, then definitely playing fast and loose with reality…the Taliban have initiated a spring offensive!!! Wow!! What have they done every other spring since 2003…? If Time wanted any credibility at all in this article it might have found a source better than Hamid Karzai whose grip on reality is tenuous at best…

And still on the Yon trail – in a good way again(Wow!! twice in a row – is Mike reforming?) – while I accept Nancy Colasurdo’s point in Spotlighting Loyalty and Our ‘Confirmation Bias’, I don’t agree that Mike was wrong in calling for a boycott of Rolling Stone magazine for its Kill Team story. I do not believe that the positioning of the Kill Team story with the roadside checkpoint video was an accident or an error – the intent was for readers to join the dots and form a totally erroneous opinion – that is both dishonest and not in the best interest of those at the sharp end of this conflict – certainly not those in US uniform – and I assume that Rolling Stone still considers itself an American magazine? No matter what one might think of the conflict in Afghanistan, how we got there or where it’s going, these are issues to be raised with politicians not targeted against those who serve… (a fine distinction perhaps – is what politicians do regarded as ‘service’?)

Yon’s call for a boycott of Rolling Stone advertisers became even more timely when the results of the Pentagon’s investigation into the circumstances leading up to the dismissal of GEN McCrystal by President Obama following another skewed Rolling Stone article were released last month…

Pentagon investigation clears McChrystal of all wrongdoing | The …

Pentagon Investigation Casts Doubt on Rolling Stone’s McChrystal …

General McChrystal did not violate US military policy, Pentagon …

SURPRISE, SURPRISE: Pentagon internal investigation of “Runaway …

General McChrystal did not violate US military policy, Pentagon …

So..until such time as Rolling Stone tidies up its act, it should be hit where it hurts the most – while is not in the court of the media where the more controversy the better the ratings but in the bank account…as Michael Yon discusses in Rolling Stone: Boycotting Advertisers…

Getting back to the Spotlighting Loyalty story…I do like the point that she raises in regard to confirmation bias…a year ago, I had no idea that such things existed; well, certainly not that such a body of social science existed around them. I have been doing a lot of reading about this and other biases and am planning an article on some aspects of them and their employment…or the practical employment of that supporting science anyway…

In other news

FM 3-24 is being critiqued again…when will it register with some people that this was the right book at the right time – FOR IRAQ – and that it was never intended as the universal panacea for all thing not major combat operations…

Fighting Al Qaeda To Fight Liberalism, that I got from Dean at Travels with Shiloh…has given some food for thought but with all the big words, it’s become a bit of a mouthful…some more digestion required nefore I draw any conclusions from it…

Over at the new Unofficial Airfix Modellers Forum, I have started to populate my work area and also started a build (which I may finish) of Trumpeter’s 1/34 128mm PAK 44…