Hope is not a plan

American oil companies are exporting oil out of our country in ever-increasing amounts even as they complain about refinery capacity being maxed and domestic fuel prices spike:

Letter from the Foundation For Taxpayer & Consumer Rights on the topic

I didn't know about this, but it's unsurprising.

"This observation, also, I have laid to heart, that they, who in matters of war seek in all ways to save their lives, are just they who, as a rule, die dishonourably; whereas they who, recognising that death is the common lot and destiny of all men, strive hard to die nobly: these more frequently, as I observe, do after all attain to old age, or, at any rate, while life lasts, they spend their days more happily."

- Xenophon, from his Anabasis

From The BBC:

Colombian gangsters face sex ban

A city official said the idea came from a meeting of wives and girlfriends over the progress of a disarmament scheme.

Naturally, the Wikipedia entry for Aristophanes' classic play Lysistrata, in which Greek women withhold sex from their husbands to force a halt to war between Greek city-states, has already been updated to mention the situation in Pereira.

This really deserves a follow-up analysis in several months to see if it worked.

Here's a particularly important procurement issue -- is Pinnacle's body armor better than the current Second Chance Interceptor vests that are issued to our troops?

As I discussed over a year ago, Second Chance has an unenviable record of selling body armor that rots under that rare battlefield condition -- contact with sweat. This only came to light after a round went right through the vest of a California police officer, but Second Chance subsequently received a second chance, and swears it isn't knowingly selling defective product. Back in late 2005, many people were lobbying for the adoption of Pinnacle's Dragon Skin body armor system. The chief selling points of Dragon Skin at the time were its flexible rather than rigid structure, and its ostensibly greater protective capabilities.

Now, prompted by repeated calls for better armor and an NBC story suggesting that Dragon Skin really is better than Interceptor, the Army's armor testing program has gone on the record saying that Dragon Skin didn't work in testing last year. Pinnacle has responded, claiming that testing was both incomplete and rigged for failure, driven by the testers' discomfort with the concept of flexible armor. As they note here, the Dragon Skin level III vests passed ballistic tests at Aberdeen Test Center last year.

Soldiers for the Truth, who originally made noise about the failure of Interceptor vests, has this to say on the topic:

Well, folks, sometimes things move much faster in Washington than experience would lead one to expect. This happened Monday and yesterday (May 21 and 22) when Sen. Carl Levin and Sen. John McCain, Chairman and Ranking Minority Member respectively, of the Senate Armed Services Committee short-circuited the public dispute between the Army acquisition mafia and NBC News about recent NBC reporting (assisted by SFTT and DefenseWatch) that showed Pinnacle Armor's Dragon Skin performed "significantly better" (the words of retired Army Gen. Wayne Downing) than the DOD issued Interceptor Body Armor system in the first-ever comparative "shoot-off."

They also have a White Paper on the topic of equipping our troops with the best possible body armor. A key figure I hadn't seen before is the Armed Forces Medical Examiner analysis of torso wounds. It concludes that 80% of Marines killed by shots to the torso would have been saved by armor with more comprehensive coverage (as is provided by Dragon Skin).

It's not yet known whether Dragon Skin really is as effective as many people believe it to be. It's certain, however, that a procurement system that continues to buy body armor from a company that fraudulently sold lethally defective merchandise to soldiers and peace officers is deeply suspect when it claims to be making the "best" decision on how to protect our troops.