Low Earth Orbit

Not everything's rotten in Europe

[source] I couldn't resist another picture of "Kristin Krohn Devold":676, the Norwegian Defense Minister, looking good in her flight suit. This is my kind of bitchin' babe:

Moments later, we [the reporter, Devold and the chopper crew] are racing at treetop level toward a Norwegian military base […] Devold encourages her pilots to show me what they can do. The chopper banks wildly, veering to the right and left, so that in one instant I am looking straight down at the ground and, in the next, straight up at the sky. The trees are never more than a few yards beneath us. […] ''We have some of the best pilots,'' she shouts appreciatively over the roar of the chopper's turbocharged engines. […] I nod weakly, trying not to encourage any further demonstrations of the craft's maneuverability. As if on cue, the pilots oblige us with a series of harrowing missile-avoidance moves known as tail-ons, during which the chopper's airframe shudders violently and we find ourselves suddenly falling -- actually falling -- backward. The civilian official next to me has turned green. Devold, meanwhile, gazes dreamily out the window, her paratrooper boots propped leisurely on the chopper's deck, a huge smile on her face.

Yowza! The real story here is that Devold is reshaping Norway's military to focus on a few, narrowly defined missions that work well with the US military. She's figured out that on the modern battlefield, it's skill and technology that matter, not masses of troops. Norway could never compete in the latter but in the former, with the kind of focus Devold is pushing and it's well educated population, Norway can be a key player on the world stage. Here's another picture of her with some groupie named "Donald Rumsfeld". The article wonders why he would

spend so much time conferring with Devold, praising her initiatives and quietly promoting her candidacy to take over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?

He's just angling for a ride in that chopper. P.S. I spotted this on my own but of course Bjorn Staerk is way ahead of me.

UN-supervised

More and more stories are coming out about the UN bombing which makes one wonder why the UN is permitted to put people in harm's way without adult supervision. • All of the guards were "former Ba'ath security agents":http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn24.html originally placed to spy on the UN. • US forces put in a protective wall but left it close to the building at the "request of the UN":http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/39299.htm • The local UN security officer in charge of the UN building in Baghdad requested increased security but was "turned down by offsite UN officials":http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/39299.htm • Security around the UN buidling had been minimized to "avoid antagonizing Iraqis":http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/6295270?source=Evening%20Standard • The death toll would have been higher if the US forces hadn't "practiced medevac at the building"::http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/39299.htm. • The spokesman for the UN condemning terrorism in Iraq was from Syria, an ally of the Ba'ath, ruled by a fellow Ba'ath party, from which hundreds (if not thousands) of jihadis have crossed in to Iraq to perpetrate exactly this kind of attack. But what could the UN do? Syria is heading up the UN Security Council. Now, of course, the people responsible for this attack are referred to as "terrorists". When they're shooting US troops or blowing up Iraqis, they're "militants". But attack the UN and that's terrorism.

Marxed by the BBC

[source] bq. The controller of BBC1 launched an unprecedented attack on Rupert Murdoch yesterday, calling the media billionaire a "capital imperialist" who wants to destabilise the corporation because he "is against everything the BBC stands for". As David Carr says, "he sounds like my kind of guy".