Berlin police catch man snorting drugs on their squad car

Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by John Sostak

BERLIN (Reuters) – German police detained a nightclub reveler they caught trying to snort amphetamines off the top of their unmarked patrol car.

The 26-year-old began lining up the powdered drugs on the roof of the car in a disco car park, when the two police officers surprised him, a Nuremberg police spokesman said on Tuesday.

The man had no idea the normal looking vehicle belonged to the police, and it was coincidence that the officers — who were walking by their parked car — discovered him just as he was about to take the drugs.

“He’s got horrible luck,” said Bert Rauenbusch, police spokesman in the southern German city.

I love this story.  That was pulled, verbatim from Reuters.  I want to post it on about 100 other sites I manage, but it is too vulgar, so… it goes into my catch all blog… which is here at Arcade.    It is like a fake Onion news article.

The story has reawakened a German wanderlust.  I was once in the US Army, and stationed in Wertheim Germany, at Peden Barracks.  I was lucky enough to be in Germany during the end of the Cold War, and was visiting Berlin when the Fall of the Wall concert was performed.  Pink Floyd, The Scorpions, Van Morrison, Sinead O’Connor (she was AMAZING).  I was polluted, but Sinead, and a younger, healthier Van Morrison were great.

I think you can do almost anything in Berlin, and it can be shrugged off as “bad luck,” when you get caught.
The Berlin police spokesman has empathy for the lunatic cokehead, I’m sorry, meth-head.  He says “he has horrible luck.”  I am willing to wager that Bert has also been on a ridiculous, filthy, coke binge.  How else can you sympathize with a man that is snorting cocaine off of a police car?  The man must have been awake for 2 days.

I will never, or at least try to never, condone doing hard drugs, or really even breaking the law.  As an adult, I have a greater awareness of how stupid actions create chaos and nonsense that should be avoided at all costs.  I will say this, if you must do drugs, you want to be arrested by a police department, like Berlin’s.  The spokesman, Bert Rauenbusch doesn’t want to arrest you.

If you were in the military, and stationed in Germany, I just created a group on FF911.org, so please join.  I would love to see some pictures from the late 80’s.  They are pretty hard to come by.  We take technology for granted, it is so easy to take digital pictures, and share them online in an instant.  Now we have to scan in our old “photo’s” and post them.  On that site a friend from the Army just emailed me a funny picture of me on the toilet.

All this reminiscing is making me crave an Octoberfest holiday…

Tags: army, police, Weird News

The Hurt Locker & Military Dogs are Working Hard in Afghanistan & Baghdad

Posted on January 23rd, 2010 by John Sostak

US Army dog team in Baghdad, both are soldiers.

I  just rented The Hurt Locker.  It was a good movie.  It is also very real, and sad.  We have a lot of soldiers sacrificing things that we take for granted, like sanity, for this ‘war on terror.’  This is a great wake up movie.  If you are trying to remain oblivious to what is happening (a war) in the Middle East, watch this, you need a reminder that we are at war.

I was in the Army, 3/35th FA, and I served in the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm.  I was fortunate that I did not see real combat.  It was a well organized deployment, and we were support with soldiers from other NATO countries, like Germany and Britain.

The current war seems to be run by a civilian workforce.  Corporations are doing work that soldiers used to do.  This is another story which needs to be reported on more thoroughly.  I hate to promote sinister conspiracy theories, so I will only say I am very suspicious.

My father was a Vietnam War Veteran, also US Army.  He was a dog handler and was in combat.  He never ‘blogged,’ or even spoke about what he did in the service.  A few clues would trickle out from time to time, but one thing was obvious, he was affected.  The soldiers that are serving on the front lines in the Middle East are too.

This war will continue for years after we stop fighting.  Thousands of soldiers are permanently damaged.  This was what I took from The Hurt Locker, and this is the story I read when I read an article about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I read most articles about the war that I come across, and I am concerned about the soldiers and the civilians serving.  I hope to one day understand why this is allowed to continue, and how we as a nation and democracy benefit from this continued sacrifice.  Here is an Associated Press article about dogs and the challenge to feed the dogs working in the Middle East.

By ERIC TALMADGE, Associated Press Writer

KANDAHAR AIR FIELD, Afghanistan – The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan has led to a dog surge — and unexpected problems in procuring high-quality dog food with enough protein and nutrients for hundreds of canines used to find explosives and perform other energy-intensive missions.

Along with about 37,000 U.S. and NATO troops, the number of military working dogs being brought into the country to search for mines, explosives and to accompany soldiers on patrol is increasing substantially, according to Nick Guidas, the American K-9 project manager for Afghanistan.

Guidas, a civilian contractor who primarily oversees dog operations in southern Afghanistan, said he has 50 dogs on operational teams and about 20 more awaiting missions. He expects that number to go up to 219 by July.
“It may go as high as 315 dogs in Afghanistan,” he said Saturday at a crowded kennel full of highly trained German and Dutch Shepherds, Belgian Malinois and Labradors on this air base, the hub of U.S. and international security forces’ operations in the volatile Kandahar area.

“Because of the surge there is more need for working dogs. But one of my main problems is getting dog food,” he said. “It’s hard to convince people sometimes that it’s a priority, but it’s a necessity if we are to keep these dogs working.”

Guidas said because of the energy-intensive demands of their missions, the dogs require special food and can’t just eat scraps.  The dog food, which is made commercially in the United States and has extra protein and nutrients to keep the dogs healthy while working in the heat and cold, must be shipped to Pakistan and then trucked to Kandahar.  But space on trucks is limited and prioritized. Food and supplies for humans come first, and logistics planners are still adjusting for the eating needs of the bigger pack of dogs to be put to work.

“It doesn’t get a higher priority than a Coke or some potato chips,” Guidas said of the dog food. “It moves when it moves.”

Even so, the dogs have become an essential component of many units because of their versatility. They can be trained to search for a wide variety of explosives and parts used in making improvised bombs.
In the past month alone, military dogs in southern Afghanistan have made 20 finds of unexploded devices, weapon caches and other materiel.

The U.S. has about 2,800 military dogs, the largest canine force in the world. It has used dogs in combat since World War I.

The dogs don’t come cheap. It costs about $40,000 per dog a year, and each goes through about five months of training. This year, Guidas expects the cost of the dog food that he needs to reach $200,000, up from about $80,000 last year.

He said each dog can work for five or six years, but the demands of the terrain and of the mission are harsh, particularly on the dogs’ joints. If a dog is injured or sick, it is not sent out on operations.

Only two military dogs have been lost in southern Afghanistan in the past five years, Guidas said.
“We take very good care of these dogs,” he said. “In some cases they are treated better than us.”

Tags: afghanistan, war

50,000 to 100,000 Dead in Haiti, Considered a “Conservative” Estimate

Posted on January 16th, 2010 by John Sostak

Haiti earthquake victims. Between 50,000 & 100,000 estimated dead

The Haiti death tolls have gone up non-stop since the earthquake days ago. The current Haiti death tolls are only in the tens of thousands, but unofficially, it may already be much more.

At this current time, they have collected 50,000 dead, according to Haitian officials. But for days, estimates have been in the hundreds of thousands range, at the very. For the moment, the Haiti death tolls have been estimated at 200,000, though that is down from the original 500,000 estimation.

Haiti’s Interior Minister, Paul Antoine Bien-Aime, told Reuters that the death toll is at 50,000 for now. His estimation is that 100,000 to 200,000 people are actually dead. But sadly, that kind of estimate is actually good news, compared to early predictions of 500,000 killed.

If the total reaches the hundreds of thousands, it will be among the deadliest earthquakes of all time. But given how many may be buried underneath rubble, and how many may never be found, it could be impossible to get a final total. Even Bien-Aime admitted that they will probably never know the exact number.

The Pan American Health Organization has a conservative estimate of between 50,000 and 100,000. However, even they really don’t have an accurate number. In any case, the Haiti death tolls may not take the aftermath into account.

No one will ever know how many people were directly killed by the earthquake, or from the horror afterward. With aid still slow to actually come in, virtually no authority in Haiti, and with the capital city practically destroyed, there is virtually nothing to stop further bloodshed.

Lawlessness, a lack of clean water, and disease could kill many more in the weeks and months ahead. Thanks to all of those factors, the true Haiti death tolls may take years to truly measure.

Please donate to help the recovery and rescue efforts in Haiti:

American Red Cross

Presidents Clinton & Bush Haiti Relief Fund

Tags: Bush, Clinton, Haiti

Twitter DNS Compromised, Hacked By Iranian Cyber Terrorists

Posted on December 18th, 2009 by John Sostak

Screenshot of Twitter after the site was taken offline by cyber terrorists (hackers).

Last night Twitter was taken down by hackers who identify themselves as the “Iranian Cyber Army.”  Pretty dramatic, and scary.  Hackers are everywhere, and none of us are safe, so seeing hackers identify themselves with Middle East extremist groups was inevitable.

I think the first and most important thing that needs to be done by us, as Twitter users, is make sure that if you have a Twitter account, you use a unique password that is not associated with other sites, like your bank or website.

Twitter is a young company with an exploding membership.  Young tech companies are less secure.  On this page we have what feels like 50 Twitter links.  They have thousands of developers building API’s, and millions of Tweet’s happening every minute.  They are vulnerable.

The Iranian Cyber Army also attacked Facebook and YouTube.  It sucks to be a member of the Twitter development team this weekend.  For the rest of us, this serves as a gentle reminder.  We rely on the web, and there are thousands of nasty people in the world that want to interrupt our lives, or worse.

Screenshot of Google result for Twitter, December 17, 2009.

Twitter was replaced by a landing page with an image of an Iranian flag.  There is an image above of a Twitter screenshot.  A Google search screenshot can be seen here too.

I’m getting ready for the Blaze football fundraiser, and I wanted to touch on this story, and the lack of attention it is receiving on television.  I am watching CNBC, and rarely does a broadcast block go by on CNBC without hearing something related to Twitter or tweeting.  Twitter is a diaper dandy in the business community.

I realize this is not an enormous story, but there is some drama here.  Is the attack being overlooked because of a long holiday week and weekend?  Maybe it having taken place only 13 hours ago has not allowed the reporters to collect enough information to report. This is a long weekend for a lot of people.

Be careful with your passwords.  Try and use different ones on the sites that you log into, and be even more careful with the ones that access finance and web.

Tags: Cyber Terrorist, Hackers, Twitter