F-22 manufacturing program to be ended

 aircraft, blather, news, politics  3 Responses »
Apr 062009
 

Oy.

http://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/stories/2009/04/06/daily9.html

The Pentagon’s $534 billion budget request for 2009 shoots down future production of the F-22 Raptor, the stealth fighter made by Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Marietta, Ga.-based Aeronautics division.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Monday revealed the Pentagon’s plans to complete its order for 183 Raptors plus four more. But the U.S. Department of Defense will order no more after that. The Air Force had planned to order 20 Raptors in 2010 and 40 more in coming years.

This is, of course, Not Good News. The F-15’s that the F-22 was meant to replace are old and creaky, but will now have to soldier on for a few decades longer. 187 F-22’s is just not that many, especially considering that around 1500 F-15s were built.
Of course, the political Left is reliable in its irrational applause:

The decision is welcome on two fronts. First, the F-22 contributes little to U.S. national security. It has not flown a single mission in the Iraq or Afghanistan campaigns. Further, as the Center for American Progress’s Larry Korb explained in 2005, the F-22 was designed to address threats that the U.S. last faced during the cold war:

The F/A-22 Raptor is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tried to do away with it in the summer of 2002 but backed off when his Air Force secretary threatened to resign over the issue. It was originally designed to achieve air superiority over Soviet fighter jets, which will never be built.

Air superiority, despite what some idjits seem to think, is never a bad thing. And the F-15, as good as it was, is not even remotely stealthy. And despite what the Unthinking Progressives claim, the Russians continue to work on more advanced fighters. The Unthinking Progressives have fallen into the old trap of not preparing for the next war, but the last one… in this case, the anti-Taliban/urban terrorist war. Trust me, the future will have all kinds of nastiness in it, and it’s better to be prepared than unprepared.
Starscream could not be reached for comment.

 Posted by at 2:34 pm

Walking against wind…

 cats, photography  1 Response »
Apr 042009
 

Koshka really doesn’t like Tak, and for good reason… Koshkas goal in life is to be left alone, while Taks goal in life is to physically dominate all other cats. A few days ago Koshka exited a “playhouse,” or whatever you want to call it, and saw Tak staring at her from above. Koshka has learned that running just makes Tak chase; I guess the predatory instinct kicks in. So Koshka has learned to do the opposite: move reeeaaaaallll slow. Took her about a minute to cross six feet. You could feel (and see) the hate just radiating off of Koshka.
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 Posted by at 11:47 pm

You’re Not Helping

 dumbassery, Obamazombies, politics, weapons  6 Responses »
Apr 042009
 

Gah. Self-fulfilling prophesy, here we come…

Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn’t clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

Way to help the cause, dumbass. With the apparent upsurge in mass killings since the 0bama regime took over, it won’t be long before the Democrats in control of Congress gin up the nads to actually try to resurrect and “improve upon” the unConstitutional “Assualt Weapons Ban” and similar fascist anti-freedom travesties.

On CNN tonight, I saw a panel discussion with the usual ratio of talking heads… one weak-willed Republican, one angry Democrat, one anti-gun nut, and one anchor. So, three agaisnt one-half. The part that *really* grated was when there was general concensus that “maybe we should be more like Europe, because they’ve got restrictive gun laws and low gun crime.” Yeah, fine… except Europe has had freakin’ genocide within the last few years. I’ll stack America’s fairly constant murder rate up against Europes “no murder, no murder, no murder, massive land war that kill tens of millions, no murder, no murder, massive land and air war that kills a hundred million, no murder, no murder, guess what’s next” history.

European-style governance? No, thanks. Saw the movie, didn’t seem appealing.

 Posted by at 11:18 pm

Lockheed CL-414: Mercury capsule predecessor

 drawings, projects, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Apr 042009
 

A mid-1958 concept for a one-man space capsule for the “Military Man In Space” effort. This was intended to be a somewhat more “operational” spacecraft than the wholly experimental Mercury capsule. Orbital vehicle weight: 2367 pounds. The capsule was shaped much like the “Dicoverer” re-entry capsules.
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 Posted by at 4:44 pm

Nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

 blather, news, religion  3 Responses »
Apr 042009
 

From the Guardian:

The two-minute video, shot using a mobile phone, shows a burka-clad woman face down on the ground. Two men hold her arms and feet while a third, a black-turbaned fighter with a flowing beard, whips her repeatedly.

“Please stop it,” she begs, alternately whimpering or screaming in pain with each blow to the backside. “Either kill me or stop it now.”

A crowd of men stands by, watching silently. Off camera a voice issues instructions. “Hold her legs tightly,” he says as she squirms and yelps.

After 34 lashes the punishment stops and the wailing woman is led into a stone building, trailed by a Kalashnikov-carrying militant.

Reached by phone, Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan claimed responsibility for the flogging. “She came out of her house with another guy who was not her husband, so we must punish her. There are boundaries you cannot cross,” he said. He defended the Taliban’s right to thrash women shoppers who were inappropriately dressed, saying it was permitted under Islamic law.

There is a video at the link (be warned: not at all pleasant). THIS is what we’re at war with. THESE are the people that the 0bama administration wants to suck up to.

If I could re-write history, that video would have gone a bit different halfway through: A V-22 flanked by AH-64’s would have shown up on site and a platoon of pissed-off Marines would have bailed out and gut-shot evey male son of a bitch there over the age of 15, the woman (and any children on-site) would have been bundled on board, and the video would have ended with the camera laying in the dirt, still running, with the air filled with the sound of the rapidly disappearing V-22… and the sounds of human garbage screaming in pain much like this poor woman.

It is, of course, not too late.

Anyone who claims that all cultures are valid needs to be held down and whipped because they were dressed wrong. Some cultures need to be freakin’ erased. We erased the Nazis. We erased the slaveowner cult in the South (though not as completely as should have been done). We re-wrote a thousand year old religion in Japan. We should have done the same in Afghanistan after 9-11. Istead, we pussed out. And now the diseased filth that is the Taliban is growing again.

Gah.

Mood: pissed off.

 Posted by at 4:09 pm

“Nice bank. Shame if anything bad were to happen to it…”

 dumbassery, Obamazombies, politics  3 Responses »
Apr 032009
 

Let me know when this sort of thing:

A: Doesn’t sound like a mafia-esque protection racket threat

B: Sounds like reasoned, mature governance worthy of the President of the USA.

<> “My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Again, ask yourself: if Bush had made this sort of veiled threat/wink-and-a-nod to those who want to kill law abiding Americans, would the media have been all over it?

 Posted by at 1:42 pm

Obamateur hour: bowing and scraping

 dumbassery, news, Obamazombies, politics, religion  4 Responses »
Apr 022009
 

An American bows to no one. NO ONE. Except, sadly, this American:

That’s right, that’s 0bama, bowing before the Saudi King Abdullah. Think it’s just a trick photo? Think again. Check out the video.
This is insultingly disgraceful. This is not an incident of being a little unaware of the proper protocol. No American should ever bow to foreign royalty (and anyone pretending to be American royalty should be greeted with a boot to the ass), and certainly not to antagonistic royalty. Meeting the King of Arabia is not the time to bow… it’s the time to stand up a little straighter.

But not for that American.  Teleprompters and prostration seem to be the hallmarks of this administration so far.

The man is an embarassment.

 Posted by at 11:00 pm

Democrat Taqiyya Talking Point: “90% of the guns…”

 blather, dumbassery, news, Obamazombies, politics, weapons  1 Response »
Apr 022009
 

From Fox News (thereby assuring that it will be discounted by the Left):

You’ve heard this shocking “fact” before — on TV and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet and from the highest politicians in the land: 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.

Don’t know about y’all, but, yes, I’ve heard this rather a lot recently. The fact that Mexican governance is a farcical sham of entrenched corruption, coupled with America’s dumbass “war on drugs,” has led to some rather staggering violence not only on the border, but spilling over into American cities as Mexican drug gangs battle each other, cops and regular citizens for dominance. “90% of their guns came from America” has been a popular talking point among left-wing journalists, more journalists, yet more journalists, politicians, screeching harpies and California Fascists since this started making the news a few months back. And why not? It’s a Scary Statistic that will help them to ram through yet more unConstitutional anti-gun restrictions (a goal that’s not even faintly disguised… many are quite open about it). Small problem: apparently that statistic, like so many thrown about by politicians, is utter rubbish, produced by quote-mining and “data enrichment.”

In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced — and of those, 90 percent — 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover — were found to have come from the U.S.

But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.

In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.

It’s not hard for someone who is either dimwitted or uninterested in facts to squeeze “90% of the guns came from the US” out of that. Sadly, laws are being passed by the dimwitted and those uninterested in facts, at a staggeringly accelerated clip since late January.

And there’s this:

The Mexican government said it has seized 2,239 grenades in the last two years — but those grenades and the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) are unavailable in U.S. gun shops. The ones used in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in October and a TV station in January were made in South Korea. Almost 70 similar grenades were seized in February in the bottom of a truck entering Mexico from Guatemala.

Anybody who thinks that Mexican criminals who are able to get grenades – including RPGs – from non-US sources, but would somehow be stymied for regular firearms if the US suddenly enacted draconian and unConstitutional gun laws… is an idiot.

What an idiot may look like:

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 Posted by at 12:54 pm
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