You're advertising here, we should get an ad at your place...

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The Armchair Generalist provides follow-up on the nuclear sting operation mentioned here. Nunn-Lugar seems to be working oh-so-well, doesn't it?

Oh, and does anyone have a good recipe for Buffalo wings?
ry
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Even the Taliban can't escape bad press about their recruiting woes

Like the anti-Soviet rebels of the 1980s and the pre-9/11 Taliban, the recruiters of today have turned to this cluster of about 25 ethnic Pashtun villages in search of volunteers.

The father of one dead enlistee says he feels honored, but with many of Shabqadar's young men dead or feared missing on the battlefield, mujaheddin recruiters are no longer welcome here.

A shopkeeper says 100 or more young men have gone missing, including his cousin, a 10th grade student, who mysteriously left home during the summer vacation and is believed to have gone to fight

They probably don't have any picket lines in front of the recruiting office or thousands of people marching in the street demonstrating against the war. It would be nice if they did, but, unlike in the United States, the "recruiters" of the Taliban/al Qaeda are more likely to shoot the protestors (why all the interviewees choose to remain anonymous) or send them a "midnight letter".

-kat
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Something else to make the French dislike us:
U.S. to become world's biggest wine market

It could be due to the changing demographics (ie, higher concentration of non-wine drinking immigrants) or it could be the ban on smoking.

"We do a lot of work with spices. Cigarettes affect the taste buds -- people wouldn't get as much out of the chef's work" if people were smoking, said owner Eddy Reignoux.

But he admits the mild climate in Marseille -- as in Italy where a ban on smoking in restaurants has been an overall success -- is a help: smokers can comfortably nip outside with a glass of wine for an open-air cigarette.

I imagine that, in places where it's colder, folks aren't nipping outside to have a cigarette with their wine. Which means, they aren't lingering around the table after dinner drinking that second or third bottle as they enjoy a smoke (the owner of this blog is a non-smoker; the denizen writing this is simply pointing out how one vice can financially impact another).
-Kat
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Back in the day, when you could just kill people and break things without a note from a lawyer, they were pre-planned, but to the enemy, random, fires at known gathering points, road junctions, Main Supply Routes, assembly areas, etc - to keep the bad guy nervous that the world around him might start exploding at any minute.

Not really relevant to today's operating environment, right? But, it *is*

The UAVs we fly over Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for targets of opportunity are a form of H&I fires, if you really want to parse it finely. We just have better sensors and fire control now.

I call the post that because it's random things posted by me and people I've given posting privileges to. It's also an open trackback, so if (Don Surber uses it this way a lot) someone has a post they're proud of, but it really isn't either Castle kind of stuff, or topical to a particular post, I've basically given blanket permission to use that post for that purpose. Another term of art that might be appropriate is "Free Fire Zone".