4/4/2013

23 Responses to “Rihanna Latest Attempted SWATting Victim”

1. Ding.

   Patterico (9c670f) — 4/4/2013 @ 10:48 pm

   
   

2. Y’all are welcome to start prioritizing this stuff more highly…

   Patterico (9c670f) — 4/4/2013 @ 10:49 pm

   
   

3. It’s going to take a death prior to any real action regarding swatting. Then you’ll actually here politicians say, it’s too bad someone had to die before action was taken.

   Amalgamated Cliff Divers, Local 157 (f7d5ba) — 4/5/2013 @ 2:04 am

   
   

4. This country is clueless.
   And stupid.

   mg (31009b) — 4/5/2013 @ 2:18 am

   
   

5. 4. This country is clueless.
   And stupid.

   Comment by mg (31009b) — 4/5/2013 @ 2:18 am

   Most definitely.

   http://freebeacon.com/female-marines-fail-infantry-officer-course/

   The only two women to participate in the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course (IOC) failed ongoing tests to determine which infantry positions should be available to women, according to the Marine Corps Times:

   The women failed the introductory Combat Endurance Test, a punishing test of physical strength and endurance, officials at Marine Corps headquarters said Tuesday. The latest class began March 28 at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., with 110 lieutenants participating. Ninety-six men passed the initial endurance test. Twelve men and two women — the only female Marines taking part — failed.

   I suppose I should caveat this by saying I appreciate the living daylights out of the women who serve, that they’re great people, that we couldn’t do without their skills and their talent. And every single word of the foregoing is true.

   But this is just idiotic.

   Steve57 (be3310) — 4/5/2013 @ 2:44 am

   
   

6. Stve57

   My daughter who is 5’9 and 125 pounds was firstone of the first in her air assault school last year. They dont have seperate standards – females have the same load, strength and time requirements as men. Also there was a higher fail rate among men than the few women who signed up in the course, so these reporters are cherry picking these stories.

   These articles tend to denigrate women serving and have very little effect on women’s abilities in combat.

   E.PWJ (016f5f) — 4/5/2013 @ 3:15 am

   
   

7. was one of the first in her class

   E.PWJ (016f5f) — 4/5/2013 @ 3:17 am

   
   

8. E.PWJ, all I can say is that I witnessed what I witnessed. I consistently saw women have trouble handling damage control equipment that men didn’t have a problem with.

   I am not denigrating your daughter’s service.

   Steve57 (be3310) — 4/5/2013 @ 4:45 am

   
   

9. the naval academys top ten naval engineering grads were all female

   EPWJ (b3df72) — 4/5/2013 @ 6:34 am

   
   

10. I will believe that a woman can do any physical task that a man can when I see a woman in the NFL.

    Women can do many things, some things better than men, but anyone who thinks that even the most physically fit woman can do things required of the most physically fit man is just wrong.
    Can some women in great physical condition do things that many men can’t? Of course, but many men can’t do many jobs in the military either.

    A woman should not be ashamed nor need to apologize that they do not have as much testosterone or muscle bulk as men.

    MD in Philly (3d3f72) — 4/5/2013 @ 6:54 am

    
    

11. Teh name of teh place
    According to Beefheart
    Diddy wah diddy

    Colonel Haiku (ba3115) — 4/5/2013 @ 7:26 am

    
    

12. rihanna gotted swatted i know i know

    it’s serious

    happyfeet (8ce051) — 4/5/2013 @ 7:31 am

    
    

13. Oooh – they said someone had been shot. We have quasi-military teams ready at a moment’s notice to swoop down by black helicopter and save the day. I feel so secure here in the ‘burbs.

    But in my old Philly neighborhood I heard gun shots fired in anger almost every day. You could find the slugs on the sidewalk the next morning. My 911 calls never once got a respoonse like this. How many murders occur in our cities every week? Does anyone care, really?

    And where are those awesome SWAT units then? Or could it be that they are equipped to confront hardened criminal gangs, but deployed to confront would-be murder-suicides?

    Just asking.

    Amphipolis (d3e04f) — 4/5/2013 @ 8:34 am

    
    

14. 9. the naval academys top ten naval engineering grads were all female

    Comment by EPWJ (b3df72) — 4/5/2013 @ 6:34 am

    I don’t doubt that for a second. Some of the finest officers I’ve ever worked for or with have been women.

    I can rattle off their qualities that made them fine officers. Not to forget about some pretty stellar enlisted personnel. But not one was stronger or faster than I was. I’m sure there are such women. I never met one. Most of the time that didn’t matter. I respected them for a host of other reasons. And the reasons I could give you would be real reasons. I don’t see any need to make up things that aren’t true and pretend I respected them for those. Which from my perspective would be showing them disrespect.

    I think it’s justified to exclude women from certain fields for a number of reasons. One is just how the politics work. It’s not a perfect example, as it’s very clear that there are many capable female pilots, but the example of LT Kara Hultgreen illustrates the phenomenon.

    She was killed because all the men who should have looked after her welfare and washed her out of flight training were instead focused on what was instead good for their careers. And at the time that meant put a woman into the cockpit of a fighter before the Air Force did so.

    The only man who was actually looking out for her was her flight instructor that gave her several serious downs. Just one of which if the pilot had been a man would have flunked him. The instructor was seen as an obstructionist and his determination to end her career as a naval aviator ended his own. He was tragically vindicated when she killed herself making one of the exact same mistakes she had made in flight training. I believe he was forced out because when he finally felt compelled to act (to save the life of another female who was not qualified to fly F-14s; the IG report found that when she flew she “consistently scared everyone” except herself) he had blow the whistle by leaking training records the Navy concluded violated their privacy.

    But he said if he was walking by a building that burst into flames he would drag you out even if you were in your underwear and not worry about your privacy concerns.

    There will be many women who will feel pressured to volunteer for combat positions who don’t believe they up to it (and I am not denigrating them when I observe that). There will be many men who will be pressured to put them into those jobs. I can’t tell you how many times I was counseled that it would be good for my career to put a woman into a job I didn’t believe she was capable of performing. I was never put under the same pressure as LT Burns, the flight instructor in question, and the fact that he ended his career as a Lieutenant is not a lesson lost on the others.

    The official line now is that the standards will be gender neutral. There will be no quotas.

    That’s what they said in 1993 when they opened up carrier aviation to women. That’s not what actually goes on.

    Steve57 (be3310) — 4/5/2013 @ 2:51 pm

    
    

15. Just one of which if the pilot had been a man would have flunked him.

    Could have flunked him. Normally a student aviator would have gone before a review board which among other actions it may take could have attrited him.

    He was tragically vindicated when she killed herself making one of the exact same mistakes she had made in flight training.

    Actually she made about five mistakes, most of which she made in training as well. Except waiting to long to eject, which was her last mistake ever.

    She was a brave woman and she died in the line of duty. She shouldn’t have been put in that position, though.

    Steve57 (be3310) — 4/5/2013 @ 3:01 pm

    
    

16. Steve,
    They will fix the problem by replacing instructors who are men with instructors who are women.

    Problem solved.

    /s

    highpockets (2d68a3) — 4/5/2013 @ 11:45 pm

    
    

17. dayum that california attorney general is a fine lookin woman kamala harris shake it for me girl

    shake it for me girl

    shake it for me

    happyfeet (8ce051) — 4/6/2013 @ 12:43 am

    
    

18. She’s no Olivia Pope, but still, meanwhile back on the ranch;

    http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/06/fox-news-reporter-going-to-jail-for-protecting-sources/

    narciso (3fec35) — 4/6/2013 @ 6:05 am

    
    

19. She was killed because all the men who should have looked after her welfare and washed her out of flight training were instead focused on what was instead good for their careers. And at the time that meant put a woman into the cockpit of a fighter before the Air Force did so.

    and the 7 men who crashed their jets into the sea that year were what?

    They were all heros, Steve, let me tell you something, there is a huge paper part historypart mil stategy that there is a parade as seniors or firsties turn them in – sometimes in wild costumes,

    The assignment – compare and contrast the airborne regiments at dday – which ones achieved their objectives and why and which one’s didnt.

    My daughter didnt turn in a 50 page tome with maps and graphics – she tuned in a one poager that basically said – Those were young American boys who dropped on to a crack formation of german paratroopers and the better part of an infantry division that had been in combat for 5 years – they kicked a$$ – all of them. They did their duty.

    there is no pilot error Steve, only dead heros

    E.PWJ (f44e22) — 4/6/2013 @ 6:56 am

    
    

20. 19. there is no pilot error Steve, only dead heros

    Comment by E.PWJ (f44e22) — 4/6/2013 @ 6:56 am

    Now you’re going so far as to deny the existence of pilot error.

    The odd thing is that’s exactly the attitude the CO of the Fleet Replacement Squadron took when he told the instructors that he didn’t care how badly Hultgreen and Lohrenz flew. That they were to going to graduate to the fleet no matter what.

    That’s exactly the attitude that got Hultgreen killed.

    So it’s not pilot error to have difficulty to maintain glideslope? During one familiarization flight she came in at such steep angle because of her high elevation approach she blew out both main mount tires.

    It’s not pilot error to fail to follow the Landing Signal Officer’s instructions and make throttle adjustments to correct her glideslope? And when she did she made erratic and unpredictable throttle adjustments?

    These were just three of her downs in training. She had at least four but the fourth escapes me. They were all serious errors and this kind of performance should have at least gotten her before a review board.

    What’s significant about those errors is that they are the same mistakes that contributed to her death. She tried to salvage a poor approach, she stalled an engine because she overcontrolled the aircraaft, she failed to respond to the LSO’s instructions, instead she applied throttle and put the remaining engine into afterburner which is what rolled her F-14 over.

    Her two other errors where that she didn’t keep her Radar Intercept Officer informed in a timely manner which nearly got him killed when he ejected, and she didn’t make the decision to eject quickly enough which is what finally killed her.

    And the thing is the Navy knew she was unqualified when they sent her to the fleet.

    Another female trainee, Carrie Lohrenz, sued the Center for Military Readiness for libel when they reported her poor performance. She was deliberately ignoring the LSOs when she attempted to land. As the LSOs noted in their sworn IG testimony any carrier pilot who ignores the LSO is inherently unsafe and must be removed from carrier aviation.

    Lohrenz lost her case badly at the initial trial and every level of appeal. The CMR reported:

    http://www.cmrlink.org/content/judicia-legal-matters/34497/lohrenz_v_donnelly_dismissed_by_the_supreme_court

    The story began in 1994, when an instructor for both Hultgreen and Lohrenz, then-Lt. Patrick J. Burns, discussed his concerns about the competence of the female trainees with local commanders. Lt. Burns and others in the training squadron were told by the squadron’s commanding officer that the women would graduate to the fleet, no matter what. On October 25, 1994, Lt. Hultgreen lost control of her aircraft on approach to a carrier, and crashed into the water.

    Glide slope errors that Hultgreen made that day were similar to performance errors she had made twice before. Even Plaintiff Lohrenz admitted under oath that she knew colleagues seeing the videotape of Hultgreen’s crash would recognize that it was caused by pilot error, not engine failure, as initially claimed by the Navy. (A subsequent mishap investigation report confirmed this.)

    Shortly after Navy officials tried to mislead the public about the circumstances of Hultgreen’s crash and the training that preceded it, Lt. Burns asked for the assistance of Donnelly and CMR in conveying his concerns about double standards in the women’s training to higher-level officials. His motivation was simple—he did not want to see Lohrenz or any of more of his colleagues die due to compromises in training.

    …A subsequent investigation of possible sex discrimination in Air Wing Eleven by the Naval Inspector General found that at the time Lohrenz was removed from carrier aviation by an evaluation board in May 1995, she ranked 113 of 113, and was washed out because of flying techniques that were “unsafe, undisciplined, and unpredictable.” Senior Landing Signal Officers (LSOs) testified that her flawed “high and fast” flying patterns, combined with her tendency to blame others for her own mistakes and to disregard instructions, made Lohrenz an “accident waiting to happen.”

    Lohrenz’s rocky F-14 training records, the same ones published by CMR, were among the documents considered by the review board, but she did not take the opportunity to challenge those records. The Air Wing Eleven investigation also revealed that Lohrenz had been on a “watch list” for poor performance as early as January 3, 1995—well before Donnelly’s initial letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which Lohrenz claimed had ruined her career.

    The training squadron commanding officer told Air Wing Eleven investigators what Donnelly’s source knew first-hand: The Navy was in a “race with the Air Force” to get women into combat aviation after regulations changed in 1993. During the same investigation, a landing signal officer testified that when he evaluated the performance of Hultgreen during carrier qualification trials, he had tried to hold her back for more training, but his judgment was overruled.

    This LSO and former instructor, whose voice can be heard on the videotape of Kara Hultgreen’s fatal mishap pleading with her to apply “power, power, power,” told investigators that watching Lt. Hultgreen die while trying to land her F-14 was the worst day of his life. (This testimony did not come to light until CMR obtained an unredacted copy of the Air Wing Eleven Report during the discovery process of Lohrenz v. Donnelly.)

    Former Vice CNO Adm. Arthur told CBS reporter Mike Wallace, during a 1998 interview for 60 Minutes, that the Navy had hoped that putting women on aircraft carriers would help its “image problems” in the aftermath of the 1991 Tailhook sex abuse scandal. During his sworn deposition taken on April 28, 2000, Adm. Arthur admitted under cross-examination “in this case we sent people to the fleet not qualified.”

    Yes, there’s such a thing as pilot error.

    Steve57 (be3310) — 4/6/2013 @ 10:52 am

    
    

21. Now you’re going so far as to deny the existence of pilot error

    So, what about the other dead pilots? Up until then, all the other pilot errors were committed by males by the hundreds…..

    Many of those were sent were not qualified either – obviously because pilot error implied a lack of proper training.

    EPWJ (f44e22) — 4/6/2013 @ 2:29 pm

    
    

22. EPWJ, they deliberately lowered their standards to get women through the training pipeline ahead of the Air Force.

    That’s one of the reasons Lohrenz lost her libel case against the Center for Military Readiness.

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2003/dec/12/20031212-103720-6162r/?page=all

    “The information that Donnelly and CMR received reasonably led them not to investigate allegedly contradictory evidence,” said Judge Judith W. Rogers, who wrote the unanimous opinion. “By the time Donnelly published The Donnelly Report, she had additional information from the Navy that appeared to confirm much of what Lt. Burns had told her about Lt. Lohrenz.”

    Concurring in the opinion were Judges Laurence Silberman and John G. Roberts.

    Judge Rogers wrote, “By the time she published The Donnelly Report, Donnelly also had portions of Lt. Lohrenz’s training records that supported Lt. Burns’ assertions that the Navy made special accommodations for Lt. Lohrenz.”

    So you are completely wrong in your assertion that “pilot error” means insufficient training. The special accommodations the Judge was referring to was precisely the extra training that wasn’t offered to male pilots.

    Or violating training standards. As when the CO refused to allow the instructor to enter Lohrenz’s failing score on a training flight into her training record, as the regulations require, simply to give her another chance to pass.

    The facts are these women lacked the initial qualifications to fly the F-14. If you knew what you were talking about you’d know that you are making apples to oranges comparisons.

    You don’t know anything else about those other aircraft losses. Whether they were attributed to pilot error or not. Or which pilot’s error, as in a midair collision sometimes the pilot who didn’t make the error is the one who can’t save the plane. And you don’t know don’t know whether those aviators died just because they lost the plane.

    It’s dangerous work. That’s why you have to have the basic skills. Which Hultgreen and Lohrenz did not. Hultgreen died in making a day carrier landing in good weather and sea conditions, making exactly the same mistakes she made in training.

    The Vice CNO at the time admitted in a sworn testimony these women did not have the skills to be there in the first place.

    During his sworn deposition taken on April 28, 2000, Adm. Arthur admitted under cross-examination “in this case we sent people to the fleet not qualified.”

    I see you don’t want to deal with that reality.

    But the fact is the Navy lowered standards under entirely political pressure. All the services will if enough political pressure is applied.

    It took the federal government nearly 10 years to pressure VMI to drop their single, stringent physical fitness standard after they lost their legal fight and began admitting women in 1997. In 2008 they went to a gender-normed standard.

    The services will do the same. They’ll alter the standards to meet the quotas. Which officially don’t exist. They always do.

    Steve57 (be3310) — 4/7/2013 @ 7:14 pm

    
    

23. http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/27/virginia.blue.angels/index.html

    (CNN) — The commander of the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels stepped down Friday in the wake of a subpar performance at a Virginia air show this week.

    “I performed a maneuver that had an unacceptably low minimum altitude. This maneuver, combined with other instances of not meeting the airborne standard that makes the Blue Angels the exceptional organization that it is, led to my decision to step down,” Cmdr. Dave Koss said in a statement, referring to the Lynchburg, Virginia, Regional Airshow.

    To say that pilot error=lack of training is frankly silly.

    He was the second Blue Angels to step down because of non-fatal pilot errors. CAPT (then CDR) Donnie Cochran did the same back in the mid-90s. He had lost confidence in his own ability to fly safely, and he said he needed to step down before he lost a plane or got someone killed.

    You simply can not compare LT Hultgreen or LT Lohrenz and their pilot errors performing the one basic task of a carrier aviator, getting aboard the boat, to these pilots.

    Pilot error most definitely does not imply lack of proper training.

    Steve57 (be3310) — 4/7/2013 @ 7:28 pm