Defense Articles

If you are planning on traveling any time soon, rest assured you will have some time to kill. Few things can take you away from those never ending lines or long flights, train, and bus rides like a good story. Reading a book is one of the great pastimes for travelers en route to their destination. Walk though the terminal of any airport and you are bound to see dozens of travelers scanning page after page of text from the latest bestseller. I too, used to be a die-hard paper and hardback book reader. That was until I listened to my first audio book. I tried an audiobook on a vacation after much persuasion from my husband who was already a longtime fan.

I was tired of craning my neck and reading by cabin light on long flight. I started to take note the he was listening to his book while comfortably reclined with his eyes closed. On bumpy car and bus rides, I had to put my books and magazines away because of motion sickness. All the while, my husband was looking out the window, soaking in the sights and listening to a good story at the same time. So I thought it was time to give my tired eyes a vacation too, and I haven’t turned back since. Audiobooks allow you to pass the time relaxing listening to the latest bestseller, catching up on the classics, or even learning a new language while you are en route to your final destination.

Audiobooks have some great advantages over traditional books. For one thing, listening is a passive activity, so there’s no need to don reading glasses and constantly scan the pages. You can simply slip on your headphones, sit back and remove yourself from the traveling fray of the airport or train station. I have found that one the most enjoyable aspects of audiobooks is that they are read by a narrator, who is often times a professional actor. This tends to bring a little more life to the story, as the narrator will often create different voices for the many characters within the story.

Also, if you are trying to brush up on a foreign language, it helps to hear the language as it is spoken by a native, as opposed to trying to discern pronunciation from text. Another great advantage is the size and transportability of audiobooks. If you download the material to your iPod or MP3 player, you can literally carry hundreds of books on a device no bigger than a deck of cards. This means that if the story that you are listening to is not quite what you expected, you can move on to a new book, or even review one of your favorites almost instantly.

Now audiobooks are not quite perfect. For one thing, it can take a bit longer to listen to a book than to read it yourself. For example, Ken Follett’s “The Pillars Of The Earth” clocks in a 40 hours and 10 minutes for the unabridged audiobook, and you could most likely read the same material yourself in about 35 hours. To me it’s similar to being chauffeured to a destination as opposed to driving there yourself. Another disadvantage, albeit a small one, is that audiobooks are not as easy to navigate as traditional paper books. If you have to review material already covered in a book, you may find it a bit more difficult to find an exact line or phrase that you had previously read. Finally, cost can be a factor as well. At a bookstore, the audio version of a book is typically more expensive than a hardcover.

While audiobooks are readily available at most book stores and even for free at public libraries, my favorite audiobook source for is Audible, an audiobook download service. Audible allows you to choose from over 40,000 titles, which you can then download to your MP3 player, or copy to CD’s. You can choose from traditional books, classic radio programs, and even magazines and newspapers. Using the aforementioned “The Pillars Of The Earth” by Ken Follett, you could purchase the hardback at your local bookstore for about $23, while the same book at Audible would cost $41. This pricing difference can be brought down however by subscribing to one of Audible’s “AudibleListener” programs.

For an introductory price of $7.50 per month, you can join Audible’s AudibleListener Gold program and get one download credit per month and also get a discount of 75% off list price for any additional audiobooks purchased that month. Most books count as one credit, but there are rare exceptions. I have found it most useful to use the credits toward larger purchases, and if needed, purchase lower price titles with the 75% membership discount. It just doesn’t make sense to use credits on books that cost less than the subscription price. In addition, you can bank your credits (up to 6) to use in the future. Once you have purchased the title, it is yours to keep. Audible keeps an on-line library of your titles, so that you can download them at any time in the future to your approved device, even if you cancel your subscription to the AudibleListener program.

To use the Audible service, you visit the website Audible.com and create an account. You will have the option of purchasing the titles a la carte, or subscribing to one of their “Audble Listener” programs, which allows you a number of credits per month, and a discount on purchases over and above your audiobook credits. They typically have an introductory special that will allow you to try the service for a lower upfront cost for the fist few months. Once you have signed up, Audible will direct you to download the software appropriate for your device from their website. One your profile is complete, you can shop by genre, author, or subject matter and begin your book.

Audible is currently running a special promotion that offers your first 3 months for $7.50/month. Click here for more information.

If you’re looking for books on building a hydrogen fuel cell, you might be disappointed when you don’t find any at your local bookstore. To find what you’re looking for, you may want to look on the internet where plans and guides are more abundant. Publishers seem to be afraid to pick up the material due to pressure from the deep-pocketed oil companies to keep this information suppressed.

There may be some books available on building a hydrogen fuel cell that uses pure hydrogen, although that actually may not be the best option for you if you are planning to use hydrogen to save gas. Pure hydrogen is a very efficient and clean fuel, but building an engine that runs 100% on hydrogen can be very expensive and complicated for the average person. A better alternative may be some type of HHO generator, which is a hydrogen based gas saver.

HHO generators actually generate a hydrogen/oxygen mixture which is used to supplement gasoline usage, and since you are not doing a 100% conversion, it is a much easier project to take on. As a matter of fact, it shouldn’t cost more than a couple tanks worth of gas in cash to build a HHO based hydrogen gas saver. Although a HHO generator won’t completely replace gasoline usage, it has been reported to improve fuel economy by up to 40% in some cases.

Through electrolysis powered by the vehicles battery/alternator, the HHO gas is extracted from plain tap water and bubbles to the top of a reservoir where a vacuum tube is situated. This vacuum tube carries the HHO gas to the engine where it will supplement your gasoline usage. Since they are a partial conversion, they are removable and will not void any type of warranty your vehicle may have.

So forget looking for books on building a hydrogen fuel cell, what you need is a guide that shows you step-by-step how to build and install your own HHO generator. For your convenience, I’ve written a review of the Top 3 Guides available that show you the whole process from start to finish.

The US Missile Defense Agency is giving away kiddie colouring books.

Children can grip their accompanying ‘cool crayons’ and colour in Reagan’s hair and a map of the US. It gets trickier to avoid going over the lines when it comes to colouring in the pictures of the ‘ground based midcourse defense’, the interceptor missile’ and the ‘exoatmospheric kill vehicle’, however.

The cool crayons, like some of the missiles the Agency plans to intercept, are made in China.

Alternatively kids can go to the US Missile Defense website and click on ‘Games’ where they can learn to play Missile Defense softball! ‘Imagine trying to hit a ball that has been thrown towards you with another ball in mid air! Better yet, TRY IT!’ encourages the multibillion-dollar agency. Yes, total spectrum dominance is fun, fun, fun! You can play it for yourselves at home! Here are the instructions:

‘What you need:

Two synthetic foam (or equivalent) soft-sided balls, at least one friend to help.

Directions:

Decide which of you will be the target missile and which will be the interceptor.

The person who is the target missile throws her or his ball into the air in an arch (as if it is a missile following the curve of the Earth) toward the other person with the interceptor ball.

The person with the interceptor ball then needs to try and hit the target ball with the interceptor ball, knocking it away before the target ball is able to hit him or her.’

But hey, it’s not just the US forces who know a good time when they see it. Last year a youth club in Cumbria was asked to run workshops as part of a family fun day at arms manufacturer British Aerospace. When asked if they needed a face painter, the nice woman from British Aerospace said they already had one who would be painting the kids in camouflage to fit the theme of the day.

Say this much for Frances FitzGerald: She has great timing. She began her book about Ronald Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1990. What an unpromising chore it must have seemed! The Cold War was ending, and missile-defense plans were already struggling; Clinton- administration cutbacks were about to make the challenge doubly difficult. Also, missile defense is a highly technical subject, one that’s tempting to leave entirely to the guys in the white lab coats; FitzGerald, a journalist with a degree in history, had no particular knowledge of rocket science. Her editors must have wondered whether the book would have any relevance at all when it was finally completed.

Yet FitzGerald persisted, for nine years. Missile defense mesmerized her, and so did Reagan. “The achievements of his administration seemed elusive to many,” she writes in the book. She wanted to know: “What other President, after all, could persuade the country of something that did not, and could not for the foreseeable future, exist?” Antiballistic-missile defense, she said, “was beyond the reach of technology.” But it marked “Reagan’s greatest triumph as an actor- storyteller.” He fooled so many, so well.

FitzGerald has now produced what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. calls “a brilliantly perceptive and illuminating portrait of Ronald Reagan.” With incredible timing: Just as missile defense has started to make news in a way it hasn’t since the 1980s, Simon & Schuster has published FitzGerald’s book, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. The critics adore it, and the catchy blurbs for the paperback edition are probably being typeset at this moment. Her story is “oddly gripping” and “clearly, eloquently, and engagingly” told, purred Alan Brinkley in the New York Times; it’s “devastating,” admired Lars-Erik Nelson in The New York Review of Books. “Endowed with enough drama, irony, and political perception to match its importance,” marveled Kirkus Reviews. “This well-written book . . . even has chortlesome footnotes,” raved Ruth Walker in the Christian Science Monitor. (Chortlesome? Alas, not everything can be “well-written.”)

If only all of this were true. Reagan and SDI have long deserved a close examination of the sort they receive from FitzGerald, but Way Out There in the Blue is a tendentious work. Sadly, it now stands as the closest thing there is to an official record of Reagan’s SDI program. Historians who aren’t yet born will turn their attention to Reagan, and it is this book-for want of any real competition-that threatens to mold their thinking on some of the most significant political conflicts of the 1980s.

The warm reception given to Way Out There in the Blue comes as no surprise. Frances FitzGerald has been a liberal star for 30 years. She has an impeccable blue-blood pedigree, descending from Boston’s Peabody clan. One great-grandfather founded Groton, and a great-grandmother helped start Radcliffe College. The historian Francis Park man, too, is an ancestor. Her father was Desmond FitzGerald, a deputy director of the CIA during its swashbuckling days. Her mother was Marietta Tree, one of the legendary grandes dames of New York. Her parents’ union did not last long; Tree went on to notoriety as a mistress of director John Huston (briefly) and Adlai Stevenson (for many years), as well as the wife of an heir to the Marshall Field fortune.

Yet Frances FitzGerald achieved fame largely through her own efforts. After graduating from Radcliffe in 1962, Frankie (as pals call her) went to work at the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, a group that secretly received CIA funding (her father helped her land the job). She wanted to write a novel, but never did. So she ventured into journalism, first writing for the New York Herald Tribune, then jetting off to Vietnam on The Atlantic Monthly’s tab. Her reporting from Southeast Asia won her an elite audience, as well as space in The New Yorker and other leading magazines. In 1972, her book on Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, nabbed the Pulitzer Prize. A fawning profile in Vogue the following year called her “a remarkable young woman within a remarkable old family.” She was made.

That first book’s appeal is easy to understand-it was saturated with the highbrow anti-anti-Communism prevailing among liberal intellectuals, then and now. FitzGerald delivered idealized portraits of the North Vietnamese, condemned American involvement, and looked forward to “one of those sudden historical shifts when ‘individualism’ and its attendant corruption gives way to the discipline of the revolutionary community.” Yes, the revolution must come: “It will simply mean that the moment has arrived for the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society from the corruption and disorder of the American war. . . . It is the only way the Vietnamese of the south can restore their country and their history to themselves.”

THE CAPITAL-JOURNAL

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — David Wittig and Douglas Lake, whose defense attorneys collected $7.9 million in legal fees during the pair’s first trial, argued Friday they shouldn’t have to spend $1,600 for two books that a prosecution witness will refer to when he testifies.

The verbal tussle about access by Wittig and Lake to the books came on the last day of the trial’s second week. The trial in which Wittig and Lake are charged with looting Westar Energy will resume Tuesday at the Robert J. Dole U.S. Courthouse.

While jurors were outside the courtroom, Edward Little, Lake’s lead defense attorney, asked U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson to order the U.S. attorney’s office to hand over two books that will be used by John Meara, a prosecution witness, when he testifies later in the trial about flight rates.

Little told Robinson he earlier had asked Richard Hathaway, lead prosecutor, to loan the books to defense attorneys, but Hathaway declined, telling him they were copyrighted material. The two books, which contain specialized material about rates charged for aircraft passengers flying between destinations, cost $1,600.

During arguments lasting about 15 minutes, Little said Wittig and Lake didn’t want to spend $1,600 to buy the books, noting that payment by Westar of legal fees for Wittig and Lake had been cut off. In May, Robinson ruled that Westar didn’t have to prepay the former executives’ legal fees, which were mandated by the company’s articles of incorporation.

Little said it was a legitimate request for the defendants to ask the U.S. attorney’s office for access to the books so copies could be made of pages to be used during Meara’s testimony. Robinson ruled that the defendants could copy pages from the books at their own expense.

Robinson cut off Westar payment of the legal fees, saying there was evidence to establish probable cause for a pretrial restraint of forfeitable assets.

After the first trial in fall 2004, which lasted 10 weeks, Wittig and Lake billed Westar for $7.9 million to pay their legal bills, which the U.S. attorney’s office said exceeded the federal prosecutors’ budget in Kansas for a year.

Wittig and several jurors driving separately to the trial on Friday were delayed in arriving at the courthouse due to a motorcycle wreck on Interstate 70 in Wyandotte County west of Kansas City, Kan. Two motorcycles collided at about 7:50 a.m., I-70 was closed for 45 minutes, and traffic was slowed for about two hours. The trial started about 30 minutes late.

Under questioning by Hathaway, James Zakoura, an Overland Park attorney representing large electric consumers in Kansas who has tracked Westar records for 10 years, testified Wittig and Lake had signed Westar code-of-ethics forms forbidding employees from personally using company planes and from committing conflicts of interest.

Wittig and Lake also didn’t acknowledge using Westar aircraft for personal flights when they signed other statements, some submitted to the federal Securities and Exchanges Commission, he said.

Zakoura earlier testified that Wittig family members made 110 flights aboard Westar corporate aircraft between 1999 and 2002, and Lake family members flew on Westar aircraft 144 times.

At one point Friday, Little objected to Zakoura testifying that he could identify the scrawled signatures of Wittig and Lake on numerous documents, some submitted to the SEC. Little asked that Zakoura’s testimony be struck, which Robinson denied. The judge said jurors could measure the weight to give to Zakoura’s testimony about the Wittig and Lake signatures.

The veteran defensive coordinator at Sevier County HS (TN) has been running a closely integrated multifaceted defense that has enabled him to attack every kind of offense thrown at him.

Like most defensive coordinators, he has a lot of respect for the Chicago Bears 46 defense, originated by Buddy Ryan in the ’80s. Ratledge has made it an integral part of the defensive package at Sevier HS.

You can read about it in Ratledge’s article in the January 2002 issue. The coach has done a very nice job of diagramming and explaining the 46 in his book. Football coaches will have no problem understanding it and incorporating it into their base defense.

Ratledge paints in the basics, the secondary coverage, how to mount the rush, the blitz package, the defense of power and no-back sets, plus a set of drills.

Few people know more about or have been more involved in the military-industrial complex than Jacques Gansler. Currently an executive vice president of TASC, an applied information technology company heavily involved in defense work, Gansler has written two previous books on the complex: Affording Defense and The Defense Industry. In addition, he has spent time in the Pentagon, serving as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for material acquisition; worked for several companies with major defense contracts, including ITT, Singer, and Raytheon; and served on numerous government-industry advisory panels, including the Defense Service Board.

In Defense Conversion, Transforming the Arsenal of Democracy, Gansler turns his attention to how the military-industrial complex should adjust to the end of the Cold War. According to him, this nation faces a dual challenge in its defense sector. First, how will the United States maintain technological superiority and a strong industrial base with a greatly reduced defense budget? Second, how can we ensure that defense spending enhances rather than reduces this country’s international economic competitiveness? Gansler’s answer is to dramatically transform the defense industry into a fully integrated civilian/military structure.

Gansler makes a long, detailed, and logical case for his position He first explains why a total transformation of the defense industry is required, then describes what such a transformation would entail, and concludes by providing specific details on how to achieve this transformation by drawing on lessons learned from previous diversification/conversion efforts.

Gansler argues that there are two reasons a total transformation is required. First, with the end of the Cold War, this nation is not currently experiencing a cyclical defense budget decline, but a permanent one. But paradoxically, the end of the Cold War has increased rather than decreased the threats to our national security. The removal of the bipolar nuclear umbrella has unleashed regional, ethnic, religious, and nationalist conflicts on an accelerating worldwide scale. Second, the economic power of the United States is deteriorating rapidly. The United States has a huge and growing national debt, a growing trade imbalance, and a declining standard of living; it is experiencing adverse trends in industrial productivity as well as losing its technological position in many critical areas.

Transformation of the defense industry would entail converting the vast majority of individual firms and plants to either dual-use or commercial operations. Only a few plants would remain defense-unique, and they would mostly be engaged in the final assembly of large weapon systems.

Gansler maintains that to achieve the transformation, the Department of Defense (DOD) would have to take five specific steps. First, whenever feasible, DOD must buy products that are already available on the commercial market. Second, the Pentagon must use commercial specifications as opposed to government or military specifications. Third, the military must adopt buying procedures similar to those used by commercial buyers. Fourth, DOD should use contract administration procedures, such as quality control procedures, that are similar to those used by commercial buyers. Fifth, government contracts should use commercial terms and conditions.

Gansler knows that there will be formidable barriers to bringing about this integration through transformation. Therefore, he argues that the transformation can be accomplished only by vigorous government action. He lays out a three-part strategy for the government to follow. It involves removing many of the current barriers to integration and providing guidelines and incentives for industry to achieve the desired objectives; ensuring industrial technological leadership in critical areas by encouraging the rapid application of state-of-the-art product and manufacturing technologies; and providing greater human resource development (education and training) at all levels of the work force.

According to Gansler, if his prescription is followed, the results will be wondrous. Defense budget savings will total about $45 billion per year. Moreover, U.S. defense and civilian industries will be the world’s technological leaders, and growth in real wages will return to the levels of the 1960s and 1970s. But if the Gansler plan is not adopted, the outcome will be catastrophic. If this nation continues on the present path, we will end up with a small, highly subsidized, inefficient, noncompetitive, and technologically obsolete defense industrial base that has no capability to meet the surges in demand produced by crises and provides no civilian benefits to the nation from defense expenditures.

Free advice is usually worth what you pay for it, and that also goes for self defense tips, especially regarding a knife assault. Many that look cool in a book or movie will get you killed in real-life.

Here are 5 self defense tips that knife experts swear by:

Knife Self Defense Tip #1

Run away if possible. The best self defense tips for knives teach avoidance. Fools stick around to get stuck while the wise retreat to safety and live to fight again.

Knife Self Defense Tip #2

If you’re too far away from your opponent, don’t even try or you might die. Self defense tips for knives only work if you are within proper range.

Knife Self Defense Tip #3

Get out of the line of attack. Use angles to neutralize the attack and put you in a safer position.

Knife Self Defense Tip #4

Attack the hand or arm that holds the knife. Once you control those, you usually control the weapon.

Knife Self Defense Tip #5

Disable the hand holding the knife. Your opponent will drop it and won’t be able to pick it back up. Disarm the knife and they might get it back. Break their hands and they will have to hold it with their teeth or toes, which makes knife fighting a whole lot more challenging.

Regardless of what self defense tips you learn for protecting yourself against an assault, remember that anything can happen and probably will. No amount of self defense tips will save you in every situation, so train hard and practice often. And carve Knife Self Defense Tip #1 into your memory.

It’s numero uno for a reason!

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Jeff Anderson is President of the International Society of Close Quarter Combatants, a member-based organizaton offering REAL self defense training to its members via…

* Real street fight video instruction…ONLINE…EVERY WEEK!

* Online “webinar” broadcasts with the world’s TOP fighters and instructors on hardcore self defense topics

* Over $250 in bonus training resources

* And MORE!

Some self defense techniques are better than others for different groups of people. Boxing may be an effective way for an already decent sized male, but there may be a better self defense technique woman. Someone who is 5′1″ and 110 lbs. may want to consider a blocking and judo-like self defense system, one where a smaller person can defend themselves using the attacker’s own momentum and strength back against them. A larger woman might find the striking self defense more effective. There are different types of self defense technique woman out there, so there is a type of self defense that will work for every individual woman.

The best way to find a self defense technique woman is to simply look at the wide array of options available, then to try them out one by one until you figure out which works best. Self defense techniques for women vary from simple martial arts strikes, to attacking pressure points, to locks and holds. Some self defense teachings take all three of these in combination to give women a full arsenal of moves to use against any potential muggers or other assailants.

Finding a particular self defense technique woman based isn’t difficult. Whether sexist or not, there is a general assumption that men already know how to defend themselves, or maybe simply take boxing or martial arts lessons, while women seem more likely to be attacked by a larger assailant. Right or wrong, that perception leads to a lot of specialized niches in the self defense field, which is why there are so many specific self defense technique woman.

Doing online research, or even reading books at your local library, is an okay way to get a start at what’s available out there, but it’s not enough. There are classes that are a weekend, or even a single day, that can help to give you at least a basic idea of taking the idea of self defense, and turning it into actual action. A self defense technique woman could be taught in these classes, and is a great way for someone without a lot of time to still get the learning and practice they need in order to defend themselves.

Many of us believe in the importance of personal self defense. But we may not have skills or training in karate, boxing, or other systems we normally associate with personal self defense, and rely instead upon the advantage of weaponry.

Weapons are intended to give us extra power and leverage, but they are not always where we need them when we need them in an emergency personal self defense situation. Many who own firearms, for example, leave them locked up at home. Others buy personal self defense products like pepper spray, but don’t have those weapons with them 24/7. So it is an important part of any personal self defense mindset to learn to recognize and use improvised weapons.

For example, here are 5 improvised weapons that can be used for personal self defense:

1) A rolled-up magazine or newspaper can be used to block or strike.

2) Entire personal self defense schools are dedicated to using walking sticks and canes as weapons.

3) Cell phones for calling and camera phones for taking pictures, can be important personal self defense tools when reporting crimes.

4) Pencils, pens, forks, and spoons are often readily available for personal self defense, in lieu of knives.

5) The belt worn to hold up your pants can be used as a powerful personal self defense weapon, to lash or strike.

Look around yourself and ponder objects in your everyday environment. Make a mental list of personal self defense weapons you can identify, and then begin to practice using these familiar objects in unfamiliar ways. You may be surprised how many ordinary household items are actually extraordinary personal self defense weapons right there at your fingertips.

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Jeff Anderson is President of the International Society of Close Quarter Combatants, a member-based organizaton offering REAL self defense training to its members via…

* Real street fight video instruction…ONLINE…EVERY WEEK!

* Online “webinar” broadcasts with the world’s TOP fighters and instructors on hardcore self defense topics

* Over $250 in bonus training resources

* And MORE!