J.D. JOHANNES ON BODY ARMOR — I told you so: “When I chased a Marine infantry platoon around Al Anbar last Summer I was armed only with a Canon XL-2 camera and only wore a kevlar vest similar to what a police officer would wear. By wearing/carrying 50 pounds less I was able to out run and climb the 21-year-old grunts.”

His earlier post on the subject is here.

UPDATE: J.D. would move even faster if he used a Canon GL2, which is smaller than the XL2 by far but has the same imaging. No interchangeable lenses, but I suspect that’s a minor drawback when covering combat.

The Insta-Wife shot most of her documentary with a Canon XL, but on one interview where she had to fly solo she took the GL2 and it was the best video — and audio — of the whole thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Greg Johnson says I’m wrong about the GL2:

The image system on the XL2 isn’t identical to the GL2. The XL2 also has 24p option (the GL2 doesn’t), where frames are “pulled down” within the camera itself to simulate the film “look.” This is the big new development in DV prosumer technology in the past two years, the Panasonic DVX100 series has it as well. One step closer to under $5000 cameras looking no different from film (to a layman) on the DVD player.

Hadn’t noticed that, but then that’s not an option that I’m interested in.

And be sure to read this underlying story on the armor subject:

Extra body armor — the lack of which caused a political storm in the United States — has flooded in to Iraq, but many Marines here promptly stuck it in lockers or under bunks. Too heavy and cumbersome, many say.

Indeed. Of course, on the general subject of whether more armor is always better I can say I told you so too!

CORY DOCTOROW: “A video made by an elections observer in Belarus shows evidence of electoral fraud. . . . Damn I’m glad my grandfather left Belarus.”

JAY LENO says that Owner’s Manuals have changed for the worse. I think he’s right.

TROUBLE FOR MICROSOFT? Blogging is involved.

“MARRIAGE IS FOR WHITE PEOPLE.”

STRATEGYPAGE ON IRAQ:

Deaths from revenge killings now exceed those from terrorist or anti-government activity. Al Qaeda is beaten, and running for cover. The Sunni Arab groups that financed thousands of attacks against the government and coalition groups, are now battling each other, al Qaeda, and Shia death squads. It’s not civil war, for there are no battles or grand strategies at play. It’s not ethnic cleansing, yet, although many Sunni Arabs are, and have, fled the country. What’s happening here is payback. Outsiders tend to forget that, for over three decades, a brutal Sunni Arab dictatorship killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shia Arabs. The surviving victims, and the families of those who did not survive, want revenge. They want payback. And even those Kurds Shia Arabs who don’t personally want revenge, are inclined to tolerate some payback. Since the Sunni Arabs comprise only about 20 percent of the population, and no longer control the police or military, they are in a vulnerable position.

After Saddam’s government was ousted three years ago, the Sunni Arabs still had lots of cash, weapons, and terrorist skills. Running a police state is basically all about terrorizing people into accepting your rule. For the last three years, the Sunni Arabs thought they could terrorize their way back into power. Didn’t work.

Yes, they chose unwisely.

AUTOBLOG reports that the first street-legal hydrogen powered Mazda RX-8s have been delivered in Japan. I’d like to test drive one when they get to America.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT IN BELARUS: Gateway Pundit has pictures.

ABDUL RAHMAN UPDATE: Charges have been dismissed.

UPDATE: Dean Esmay draws a larger lesson. And LaShawn Barber says it’s “A giant step toward civilized society.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Or maybe not, if this report is true.

SO NOW AMAZON seems to think that I’m interested in knitting. At least, recommendations for knitting books, knitting supplies, etc., keep showing up.

I don’t knit, I’ve never bought any knitting supplies or knitting books, and I have no idea where this is coming from. I’ve actually been buying less stuff than usual from Amazon, and the only non-book purchase I’ve made lately was not very knitting-related. Maybe they’re pushing knitting on everyone, like they did with the defibrillator? Hard to believe. I mean, I know all the cool kids are doing it, but still . . .

UPDATE: Apparently all the cool kids are doing it. Who knew?

ANOTHER UPDATE: My goodness, I mean all the cool kids are doing it! Maybe I should just surrender to the power of data-mining, like Mickey Kaus did!

ED MORRISSEY wants to censure Russ Feingold.

RUSSIA AND IRAQ: Gateway Pundit has an excellent roundup. It’s a must-read.

MORE AGGREGATION: An Army of Davids gets a good review in the Sun-Times: ” I will make a prediction — in December, when lists of the most important books of the year are drawn up, this one will be near the top.”

I could live with that. Plus, Nick Gillespie reviews it in the New York Post: It’s “breezy and eminently readable,” and Gillespie says “there’s no question that he is providing an essential guide to the new world we live in.”

AMBIENT REALMS: Long night last night, as I had to go get the Insta-mother-in-law from the hospital around midnight; she had gotten a bad case of the stomach bug that’s going around and had to go get rehydrated. (She emerged a new woman, walking under her own power and looking 20 years younger than just a few hours earlier — let’s hear it for Ringer’s Solution!)

While I was waiting in the hallway, something you always do a lot of at hospitals, there were three different monitor devices of some sort, beeping at irregular intervals. Their different pitches formed a perfect minor triad, and I was more or less right in the middle. I wish I’d had a digital stereo recorder: Instead of Todd Steed and John Baker’s Music for Bus Stations, I could do Music for Emergency Rooms. Or maybe not.

MARK FRAUENFELDER remembers Buck Owens. More here.

I’VE GENERALLY FAVORED OPEN IMMIGRATION, but I find myself feeling less and less that way in the face of mass rallies by illegal immigrants like this one.

Illegal immigrants as individuals just trying to make a better life are sympathetic. Illegal immigrants as a mass movement making demands on the polity are considerably less so.

I’m not the only one to get this impression, as Mickey Kaus’s report on the rallies in Los Angeles indicates. I think that these marches just made passage of strict immigration laws much more likely.

UPDATE: Reader Harmon Dow emails:

I saw the rally in Chicago about a week ago. Got caught up in it in the Loop at lunch.

What struck me was that it was a very pro-America rally. Here & there, a Mexican flag, quite a few anti-Sensenbrenner signs, but mainly American flags & signs, carried by a lot of young & middle-aged men & women. There were a number of kids, & I had the feeling that many of the marchers were family groups.

Right now, these people are positive about our country, and are interested in being Americans. I hope we have the sense to go with that, rather than subvert it, because at some point, I fear that they might decide that if they can’t be Americans, they’ll just have to be Mexicans. But not in Mexico.

Kaus’s take on the L.A. march is a bit different (then again, so is L.A.), but this is a good point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A more positive take on the Los Angeles march here, from A.M. Mora y Leon. On the other hand, reader Jake Jacobsen emails:

With all due respect to Mr. Dow I attended the rally and covered it for my blog. I found the proportions of Mexican to American flags ran about ten to one and while yes, it was a primarily family affair I had zero sense that “these people are positive about our country, and are interested in being Americans.”

Didn’t see it at all.

His blog posts are here and here. And Virginia Postrel observes: “Workers, especially those who want to settle and become citizens (or have their children become citizens), are not threats. They’re contributors to American society.”

MORE STILL: Bill Quick thinks that Virginia is overly optimistic.

PERRY DEHAVILLAND has a report, with numerous photos, on today’s free speech rally in Trafalgar Square. By “free speech rally,” of course, I mean “rally to oppose efforts at Islamist censorship.”

Perry concludes: “On two occasions, The Plod tried to prevent certain signs being shown (one featured the Mohammed Cartoons on a placard from the Iranian Communist Party and another showed a mask of Tony Blair over a Nazi symbol). These incidents at a ‘pro-freedom of expression’ rally, and the presence of the police taking pictures of the crowd, were a useful reminder of the deadening hand of the state and just how precarious . . . civil liberties in Britain are.”

MORE ON PROBLEMS IN FRANCE, from Claire Berlinski in The Washington Post.

BRUTALITY IN BELARUS:

The other opposition candidate, Alexander Kozulin, marched a few hundred people to a detention center where the October Square demonstrators had been taken to. They faced a SWAT team and the army. Just hours after the peaceful rally, they were all beaten.

The head of the SWAT team beat Kozulin and arrested him. They fired smoke grenades, noise-makers, and tear gas into the crowd. They exploded directly above people. One by one they were stripped away and beaten in the face, back, and legs with batons until they bled. The women, instead, were punched in the face. Then they were taken away in paddywagons to who knows where. At least one person is confirmed dead with a skull injury. Even sicker is that Belarus state television showed up so that they could film a beaten man and say that he was stomped on by his fellow protestors. The protestors are hardly the animals here. All they could do was throw snowballs back at them.

Milinkevich’s press secretary Pavel Mazhejka was briefly detained, and for awhile Milinkevich himself was nowhere to be found. But he is alright and has said that the authorities are fully responsible for the slaughter of the protestors and they will be held to account. He has sworn that Lukashenko will not finish this five year term. It has become the top news on CNN.

More reports on BR23, and Veronika Khokhlova’s blog.

BILL QUICK posts his weekend cooking thread, and it’s about pizza.

What I love most about pizza is the tomato sauce. My complaint about a lot of places nowadays is that they seem to think I want cheese toast — they put a pound of mozzarella on, but hardly any tomato sauce. The other way is healthier and, to my mind, tastier.

UPDATE: Michael Silence agrees.

MICKEY KAUS recommends this Lazy Muncie video. It’s pretty cool.

NAVAL ACADEMY GRADS CHOOSING MARINES:

When it came time for Jake Dove, a senior at the U.S. Naval Academy, to decide how he would fulfill his required military duty after graduation, there was no question about it: Marine Corps all the way.

“In my eyes it’s a perfect community,” said Dove, an Annapolis High School graduate. “The idea of being a platoon leader in charge of guys that have done two, three tours in Iraq already, when I haven’t been over there – that’s an awesome responsibility. I’m eager to take it on.”

Despite a war that has entered its fourth year with mounting casualties and waning public support, more and more midshipmen at the Annapolis military college are volunteering for the Marines when asked to choose how they will fulfill the five-year commitment required of all academy graduates.

When the assignments were made official last month for the 992 members of the class of 2006, 209 were placed as officers with the Corps – the most in the school’s 161-year history. . . . Having a surplus of mids who want to be Marines has been a change from the Vietnam era. In 1968, the Marine Corps failed to meet its quota for the first time in academy history.

That’s very interesting.

UPDATE: The “mounting” casualties language irritated a lot of readers, who sent emails like this one from Matthias Shapiro:

I know this is a small and stupid observation, but what the is point of articles like this refering to “mounting casualites”? Casualites are, in fact, decreasing steadily. And if they’re talking about the total casualty list… do they think that we are going to see “receding casualties” anytime soon? Just a thought.

Well, there’s the whole zombie soldier angle. But yes, although “casualties,” being additive, are always going to “mount” over time barring new improvements in resurrection technology, the casualty rates are falling, something the “mounting casualties” language obscures.

Of course, we see the same error in reverse elsewhere. When we reduce spending growth rates, it’s treated as a “spending cut,” so it seems only fair that when casualty rates go down it should be treated as “receding casualties,” just for consistency’s sake, but I’m not holding my breath for that . . . .

Meanwhile, John Barton emails: “It is interesting. So too is the lack of broad coverage. There was a month or two about a year after the war started when the military missed recruiting goals. It was front page news at the Times. Since then, months in which the military has exceeded quotas go unreported, as does your item.”

Yeah, go figure.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Er, maybe I wasn’t clear above, as Hiawatha Bray emails a “correction” that seems to restate my point:

Of course, casualties in Iraq are “mounting.” They mount every time one of our guys is killed or wounded. Those who died there last year are still dead, just like Francisco Franco. So with each new casualty, the number mounts. The speed with which they’re mounting is a different issue altogether.

Isn’t that what I said above, about “casualties” being additive, and casualty rates being different? I sure thought it was, and it was certainly what I was trying to say. I guess I wasn’t clear enough.

MORE: Reader Dana Honeycutt says it was an analogy too far:

Re: Hiawatha Bray’s “correction”: His correction may have been motivated by your confusing analogy with government spending,. While it is true that the MSM refers to a reduction in the growth of spending as a “cut”, it is also true that it is possible (in principle at least!) for government spending to actually decrease. This is completely different from the additive nature of casualties, so it’s really not “the same error in reverse”.

So, while I think your main point as stated was perfectly clear, the comparison to government spending muddled it.

(Yes, I know I’m nitpicking, beating a dead horse, and being pedantic here.)

Hey, if it weren’t for those three activities, would we even have a blogosphere? But I probably should have left that last analogy off. Less is usually more with blogging, in my experience.

FINALLY: Major Richard Cleveland has the last word on this:

It would also be correct, but not politically correct, for the MSM to say that Annapolis grads are choosing to become Marines because the number of Iraqi Veterans continues to mount, and their stories of what is really happening on the front lines in Iraq are spread among those just now entering the service.

Good point, especially as the services are making use of veterans in recruiting.

IN THE MAIL: Carved in Bone : A Body Farm Novel, coauthored by my University of Tennessee colleague Bill Bass of “Body Farm” fame. (Bass is also the author of the nonfiction book, Death’s Acre, and my younger brother worked as an assistant there, boiling down corpses in turpentine with his grad-student girlfriend. Now that’s an exciting weekend. . . .)

BRUSSELS JOURNAL looks at Europe’s economic problems:

The reality of Europe’s ailing economy contrasts sharply with its economic potential and with the massive resources employed to cure its ailing growth. The whole arsenal of Keynesian remedies has now been tried and has failed one by one. Massive deficit spending throughout the eighties and nineties has left Europe with a public debt unequalled in history. The size of Europe’s monumental public debt is only surpassed by the hidden liabilities accumulated in Europe’s shortsighted pay-as-you-go public pension schemes. . . .

Europe’s well-intentioned model is not working because it does not pay to work after the taxman has taken his share. Europe is not innovating because it does not pay to innovate after the huge costs of complying with all the prescriptions, limitations and restrictions in all Europe’s overabundant licences and autorisations. Demoralization is the real cause of Europe’s stagnation. Europe’s workforce is tired of being incessantly hindered in its task of producing wealth. Demoralization is the reasen why ever more engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs flee Europe’s tax misery. Paradoxically, the Old Europe of the West must now learn from the New Europe of the East, where after years of disastrous socialism, low and simple flat taxes are being introduced, luring investors from all over the world.

Read the whole thing, and also read this prophetic email from the early days of InstaPundit.

UPDATE: More on Europe’s problems in this article. (PDF). I very much hope that the Europeans manage to turn things around, as trouble in Europe has a way of becoming trouble worldwide.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here are more thoughts from Larry Kudlow. “All of this is reminiscent of the British disease of the 1960s and ’70s. Back then, striking labor unions closed down the English economy again and again, and it took until the early 1980s for Margaret Thatcher to put an end to it.”

BELARUS UPDATE:

MINSK, Belarus Mar 25, 2006 (AP)— Thousands of Belarusians defied a massive show of force by the hard-line government Saturday, protesting in streets swarming with riot police and gathering peacefully in a park to denounce President Alexander Lukashenko after a disputed election returned him to power.

(Via Newsbeat1).