Saturday, July 14, 2007

AQ chatter


What to make of it? (Pic is from here; to see why, read the comments section.)

7 comments:

Arelcao Akleos said...

AQ and MT are always chattering...but the one constant I've note over these last few years is that an attack always seems to catch the authorities off guard. Either by hitting against the indications of the "chatter-0-meter" or, more usually, in a very different spot than the authorities interpret the chatter as indicating. For example, Brits become convinced something is about to happen there, but then the Aussies are the ones to get it. Or Chertoff's boyz go into panic mode, and then the Brits get it. etc...
So what to make of it? I'll assume that there is always a next target on MTs little list, and just keep your eyes open,the powder dry, and do NOT wait until you see the color of their eyes

Tecumseh said...

MT=MI, or what? As for the advice at the end, I thought one is supposed to wait till one sees the white in their eyes. But I never went though basic training -- what do they say at Camp Lejeune?

Arelcao Akleos said...

MT = Muslim Terror
it is a subset of, but a proper one, of IM, where IM= Islam Militant.
For example, Al Turki, Prince of the House of Saud and recent ambassador to the USA, good friend to the House of Bush, is a proud sponsor of Islam Militant, here and the entire Dar al Harb. To him we can give thanks for funding many a nicely Militant islamic organization on our sod. He is an "ideas" and money man, and has many layers of plausible deniability between himself and those who carry out armed attacks on us. So he is not a member of MT, but definitely is one of IM.
Sorry, should have explained the lettering.

Tecumseh said...

OK, got it now. Good to have shorthands, but also definitions to go with them!

Arelcao Akleos said...

"As for the advice at the end, I thought one is supposed to wait till one sees the white in their eyes. But I never went though basic training -- what do they say at Camp Lejeune?"

They said that if you can see the whites of their eyes then chances are they can see you and you have fucked up the ambush bigtime.
The other thing they said was that if you can kill the bastards at 500 meters then what are you waiting for?
They said many wise things at Camp Lejeune

Speak a little more seriously, the "whites of their eyes" riff refers to the advice given to the minutemen at Bunker Hill. They were almost all rank amateurs, and the muskets they had were not accurate at all beyond 30 yards or so [they could kill further, but hitting something at more than a short distance was a genuine crapshoot]. The commanders feared that the guys would fire off indiscriminately at the first sight of Brits, hit almost nothing and, as muskets took a heck of a long time to reload, be sitting ducks for a quick redcoat charge. The hope was that [a] by the time you could see the whites of their eyes they were close enough that most folks could actually hit someone when they shot, and [b] that most folks would see these "whites" at roughly the same time, and so there would be a true volley rather than scattered shots. This volley was necessary to get the Brit lines to be stunned and fall back just long enough to let a second line to come in and shoot while the first reloaded.
It was a neat rule-of-thumb act of "quality control".

Tecumseh said...

Sounds like they teach useful stuff at Camp Lejeune -- well, useful if you happen to be on the fire line, and you want to let the other bastard die for the Motherland. Speaking of which, who do you think gave the "white of the eyes" order at Bunker Hill: Israel Putnam or William Prescott? According to wiki, another reason was that the Massachusetts soldiers were very low on ammo...

Arelcao Akleos said...

I'd vote for Israel Putnam, as his name is mathematically neoconish enough to give Pepe fits.
As for low ammo, that would have played a role presumably. But to what extent that factored in with "white's of their eyes" I ain't got the foggiest.