I have been watching quite a bit of Olympic coverage so far. Here are a couple of things that have crossed my mind. In no particular order.

Although rooting for the US men’s basketball team, I’m not shedding any tears over their struggles so far. I don’t really get the impression that anyone else in America is, either. Nothing personal against the players, but after the first Dream Team, where we proved what our varsity could do, it’s been hard to really get pumped for these guys.

Despite wanting the US to win the gold medal race, I wouldn’t mind seeing Paul Hamm give his medal to the guy who would have won if the judges would have been perfect. Even though there really shouldn’t be any discussion about it at all. I don’t think he’s at all obligated to, and I don’t think it will reflect poorly upon him if he doesn’t. I am not saying that that he “should”. But it would be the mother of all class acts, wouldn’t it?

I’d be curious to see exactly what the Iraqi soccer team was asked and the way the questions were framed about Bush’s use of the Iraqi team in a campaign commercial. I haven’t seen the ad, but unless Bush is really trying to take credit for the team’s on-field performance (as opposed to the freedom of the team to play or the end of Uday’s terrorist approach to coaching) I don’t see anything wrong at all. The Iraqi Olympic Committee claims the story was “engineered” and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

Is it me, or is the US women’t softball team just plain amazing?

After all the hype of returning to the site of the first Olympic games 3000 years ago, and the fact that women would now be competing on the spot, the first female gold medalist has been stripped of her medal for blood doping. Nice.

I think we’re going to get 100 medals, even though we might be nearing the end of US Olympic dominance, whatever that means. When the USSR lost it’s dominance, it was because the massive programs that turned out world-class athletes like assembly lines were cut or curtailed. The nation that will take our place at the top of the pyramid, China, has those same sorts of programs. We don’t. The fact that we can hang with them, and in many cases surpass them, consistently says a lot.

The Gray Dragon (Aug 22, 2004 entry)

The gray-colored F-117A stealth fighter apparently is flying day and night missions. I take this to mean mission over Iraq or Afghanistan, but that isn’t clear. I noted the plan to test the gray stealths in December. According to Strategy Page:

The test aircraft, nicknamed “Dragon,” has now been dubbed the “Gray Dragon.” If the gray pattern is successful, the current fleet of fifty-five F-117 will be repainted in the two-tone scheme. It won’t be the first time the F-117 has operated in different colors. During the mid-90s, the Air Force experimented with a camouflage scheme that was a gray scheme with swaths of brown and blue to break up the shape, but someone high in the chain of command allegedly demanded an all-black color scheme for the fleet.

See my December post for a pic.

Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice will match all donations up to $100,000

A new network called Strengthen The Good has been put together to try and mobilize the blogosphere’s response to charities. It was formed by Alan at The Command Post and is intended to help raise awareness of micro-charities.

My intention is to highlight efforts I think MO readers might be interested in. I’ll post about it and put a link near the top of my sidebar. There will be no coaxing. There will be no begging. There will be no guilt trips. I will point it out, and you can wander over if you feel the desire, and you can link if you have a site of your own and you think your readers might be interested. That’s the whole idea.

The first post isn’t exactly the type of small organization that Alan intended, but Charley happened and this group will match donations and it seems to be something that a lot of people would be willing to kick in a couple of bucks for.

Go check it out if interested.

From ArmyTimes Frontline Photos (Aug 20, 2004). The caption:

A soldier uses a dummy to draw a sniper into view in Najaf, Iraq, on Friday. Militiamen loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr removed their weapons from the revered Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf late on Friday as part of an effort to end a two-week-old uprising centered on the holy site. (Jim MacMillan / AP photo)

The battle in Najaf against the forces of Darth Sadr, heroically holed up in the Imam Ali Shrine mosque, continues. If someone takes a shot at this bait, the shooter may reveal himself. If he does, other snipers will take him out. That probably means this unit is not engaged with forces in the mosque itself, since US forces are trying to avoid direct attacks on the holy site.

Unless of course, the Americans are trying to shame the Sadr soldiers into firing at a juicy imperialistic target so that patriotic Iraqi sharpshooters can clear a holy Shiite of a cancerous infestation.

If this standoff ends with Iraqi forces storming the mosque, it will be bloody. Many will die. The Sadr forces, of course, may have the whole place wired to explode. But the Iraqi military will have some heores.

In the meantime, Sadr’s thugs are welcome to take some potshots at this helmet.

Army testing lighter, more accurate combat weapons

A commenter in my most popular XM8 post gives me the heads up the the 10th Mountain Division tried out the new rifle this week.

Soldiers with the Tenth Mountain Division got to try out the new weaponry this week. The sleek, bullet-shaped profile gives the X-M-8 a futuristic look.

That’s part of the design. As one Army official says, soldiers like to have a cool-looking weapon.

I’m thinking that the coolness factor isn’t all that important. No word on what the 10th thought. About the weapon or the coolness.

UPDATE: Came across this pic of soldiers testing the XM8. It’s NOT the 10th Mountain Division. I found it in a February National Defense Magazine article. One weapon appears to be the sharpshooter variant with the longer the barrel. It doesn’t have a bipod so it’s probably not the automatic weapon variant. The guy firing from a keeling position has the baseline carbine variant and an attached XM320 side-loading 40mm grenade launcher.

All in all, between the confusion about the XM8′s lineage and the focus almost completely on the weapon’s appearance, I’d say this isn’t the most informative article on the XM8 to appear. Nice to know that the 10th Mountain tried them out, though.

I wrote today about why Kerry is wrong in his criticism of Bush’s announcement that the US would withdraw some troops from garrisons around the world. I think I was totally correct in my assessment.

But ACE pointed out that Kerry himself suggested, not three weeks ago, that some troops in Korea and Europe might be pulled home. In the Boston Herald, covering an ABC News episode of “This Week”:

Asked whether he would promise to have US troops home from Iraq by the end of his first term, Kerry replied: ”I will have significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops. We will probably have a continued presence of some kind, and certainly in the region. If the diplomacy that I believe can be put in place can work, I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just there but elsewhere in the world — in the Korean Peninsula perhaps, in Europe perhaps.”

Now, I’ll grant that he prefaced his Korea and Europe remark by referring to diplomacy “put in place” in Iraq. So either he thinks that trouble in Iraq means we need to keep troop levels where they are in Korea and Europe, or he doesn’t. His words seem to indicate the former, which doesn’t make much sense to me considering the type of conflict we’re involved in in Iraq, but I’ll play along.

As Kerry pointed out in his recent remarks, the plan that Bush announced doesn’t begin until 2006. Does he think that diplomacy, any diplomacy, won’t be put in place and have a chance to settle things down in the next two years? And even if he does, does he think we’d just keep withdrawing troops if the situation on the ground in Iraq or other places indicated that doing so would be a bad idea?

This afternoon someone said that they weren’t concerned about Kerry’s so-called “flip-flops” because his ability to look at a Senate vote of his from six years ago and to alter his position indicated to her that he was open-minded and willing to change his priorities based upon new information. I said I wasn’t talking about six years ago. I told her I was talking about six months, six weeks, and six days ago. She didn’t really have an answer for that.

UPDATE: Photodude has a great post on this subject.