I’m not sure why I find this as interesting as I do. Maybe its the near-natural movement of the fish. Any way, click on the picture and give them a nibble.

The Navy has begun beating this drum pretty hard:

With the mandatory wear date for the Navy Working Uniform about four months away, Navy officials are worried a majority of the fleet won’t have the required four complete sets of the uniforms and all accessories by Dec. 31 deadline.

On that date, the NWU becomes the official working uniform of the Navy, replacing existing utilities and wash khakis altogether.

According to NavAdmin 287/10, released Friday, sales of the uniforms indicate the average sailor has purchased just 1.3 uniforms, “well below the four uniforms per sea bag which most sailors have been paid to procure,” the message said.

Perchance there’s a subtle, “enough already” message to Big Navy on the uniforms issue in there. And for those of you wondering, no, I don’t have any or intend to purchase a set until I know what my next job is. My current job is all about office work and lead by people smart enough to know you don’t need cammies in cubicles.

The constructive interference from three different projects and activities here at work has put a cramp in my blogging for the last few days and will continue through the week. I’ll still be reviewing my reading list and sharing items as time permits, though, so if you haven’t already subscribed to the feed, now might be the time.

I spent the day today generating, on short notice, a four-page memo justifying a key component of the program I’ve been given to run. So, I guess I can finally be called a purple-suited b***-sh** merchant.

I must still have too much of the ship life in me, because, well, I feel dirty.

Proving the slippery slope argument is not always wrong, social commentators like myself have been predicting this for a long time:

Leading mental health experts gave a briefing on Tuesday to warn that a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is being revised now for publication in 2013, could devalue the seriousness of mental illness and label almost everyone as having some kind of disorder.

Citing examples of new additions like “mild anxiety depression,” “psychosis risk syndrome,” and “temper dysregulation disorder,” they said many people previously seen as perfectly healthy could in future be told they are ill.

“It’s leaking into normality. It is shrinking the pool of what is normal to a puddle,” said Til Wykes of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London.

Looks like Dr. Harris has some serious editing to do. Maybe there’s an opportunity for a support group for us, though. Call it “Normals Anonymous”.

“Hi, I’m Chris, and I’m, well, normal.”

Here’s something that always frustrated me during 13 years aboard ships: “standardization” never seems to mean what a normal person would think. For example, read this post to one of the forums to which I belong:

SUBJ: [7-meter Rigid Hulled Inflatable Boats] come in 4 Different Sizes

Did you know there are 4 different manufacturers of 7M RHIBS? And each boat has a different hull profile which means it won’t rest properly in the skids unless it has the boat davit shoes meant for that particular hull. I didn’t know this until we found a ship that had the improper boat davit shoes held in place with duct tape. If you change a boat out, it’s up to the ship to recognize whether you got a boat from a different manufacturer and the procedure is to put a 2K [a request to change the configuration of your boat cradle] in to get new boat davit shoes made.

This doesn’t make sense to me as that means you’ll have the wrong shoes for a couple of months until the 2K gets acted on. [emphasis added]

At a more fundamental level, it doesn’t make sense to me that we have four different boats built to the same spec and represented as interchageable, that aren’t actually…you know…interchangeable. As a veteran of two tours as a 1st LT, though, I saw this sort of stupidity all the time.

I haven’t worked around civilians much for the last decade, and I’ve never worked at a place where civilians are in the majority. But, it seems to me the folks I work with are much too quick to turn off the warmer under partially-full, perfectly good pots of coffee.

Grrrrrr….

After backing down on initial plans to operate George Washington in the Yellow Sea as part of the initial round of US-RoK exercises in response to the sinking of the Cheonan, State and Defense seem to have come back with a counterpunch that will no doubt knock policymakers in Beijing off balance.

Opening a new source of potential friction with China, the Obama administration said Friday that it would step into a tangled dispute between China and its smaller Asian neighbors over a string of strategically significant islands in the South China Sea.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at an Asian regional security meeting in Vietnam, stressed that the United States remained neutral on which regional countries had stronger territorial claims to the islands. But she said that the United States had an interest in preserving free shipping in the area and that it would be willing to facilitate multilateral talks on the issue.

Though presented as an offer to help ease tensions, the stance amounts to a sharp rebuke to China.

You can say that again. In all, this is an excellent move and should help disabuse any notion in Chinese planning circles that they have the initiative in this dispute. The big question is, however, will Washington keep the press on, or is this just a one time poke to get Mr. Hu’s attention? I would bet most of the Asia-Pacific hopes we keep pressing.

[Update] No surprise, China’s government is up and spinning on the governor:

The Chinese government reacted angrily on Monday to an announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that Washington might step into a long-simmering territorial dispute between China and its smaller neighbors in the South China Sea.
…
Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi of China warned the United States against wading into the conflict, saying it would increase regional tensions.

“What will be the consequences if this issue is turned into an international or multilateral one?” he asked in remarks published on the Foreign Ministry’s Web site. “It will only make matters worse and the resolution more difficult.”

The state-run news media were far less diplomatic, describing Mrs. Clinton’s speech as “an attack” and a cynical effort to suppress China’s aspirations — and its expanding might.

“America hopes to contain a China with growing military capabilities,” ran an editorial Monday in the Communist Party-run People’s Daily newspaper.

Global Times, an English-language tabloid published by People’s Daily, said, “China will never waive its right to protect its core interest with military means.”

Chris van Avery is a Military Professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. The views represented herein are his own.

In a kind and gentle way, that is.

Add another item to the “be careful what you wish for” category. The Presbyterian Church (USA) is muddling through their annual convention with a number of serious questions on the agenda, including a further expansion of ideas typically characterized as “welcoming and affirming” by more liberal congregations. This year, one of the “ecumenical observers” invited to the convention and allowed to the podium was Archpriest Siarhei Hardun of the Orthodox Church in Belarus. Unfortunately for the more liberal members of the PCUSA, the good father didn’t allow the other kind of PC sensibilities to get in the way of telling the truth.

Christian morality is as old as Christianity itself. It doesn’t need to be invented now. Those attempts to invent new morality look for me like attempts to invent a new religion — a sort of modern paganism. … When people say that they are led and guided by the Holy Spirit to do it, I wonder if it is the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Bible, if it is the same Holy Spirit that inspires the Holy Orthodox Church not to change anything in Christian doctrine and moral standards. But if it is the same Spirit, I wonder … if there are different spirits acting in different denominations and inspiring them to develop in different directions and to create different theologies and different morals?

Amen to that, brother.

My ISP migrated a whole bunch of sites, mine included, to a new server over the weekend, and they were experiencing a whole host of problems yesterday. Things seem to be resolved now, so happy reading!