Still need to tinker a bit with the text on the webpage.
Ah, 1963. When men were real men, women were real women, and hippies were a fever dream of horrors to come. When aerospace planners planned big, and aerospace engineers designed big, and the future looked freakin’ AWESOME. When NASA asked “so, what comes after the Saturn V,” Martin Marietta stepped up to the plate with a series of designs for the Nova (AKA “Post-Saturn”) . The designs were many and varied, but all were substantially badass, with a payload of about one million pounds.
But alas… instead of Nova and the expansion of human civilization into the cosmos… we got the “War on Poverty.” Bah.
NOTE: If you like this artwork and/or the other stuff I post, you can support the cause by Buying My Stuff, which includes aerospace drawings and documents, as well as the journal of unbuilt aircraft and spacecraft projects, Aerospace Projects Review.
Or you could just Donate. So far, the mortage doesn’t just pay itself…
Wildlife photographer Lee Whittam was observing lions last December in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, when he captured the incredible moment the lioness clawed the lion’s tongue.
She had been whipping into a jealous rage after a neighbouring in-season lioness called to the lion, and was trying to stop him from crossing over to her.
But the male shook off her desperate attempts, crossing a channel of water to find the other female that was calling him.
YOW! Higher rez photos at the link.
But where have I seen that look on the lioness’ face before…. hmmm, let me think…
<> Yeah, it’s pretty much time for the British people to roll up their current government and stash them away in a looney bin, and replace them with something less monumentally stupid. Behold:From The Independent…
Sixteen people banned from entering the UK were “named and shamed” by the Home Office today.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she decided to make public the names of 16 people banned since October so others could better understand what sort of behaviour Britain was not prepared to tolerate. … The list of the 16 “least wanted” includes radio talk show host Michael Savage, real name Michael Weiner.
Michael Savage???
Any nation has the right to exclude whoever the hell it wants from its shores. Only a citizen has the right to actually be within a country; it’s a priveledge for non-citizens, one which can be taken away on a whim at a moments notice. However, a nation should have some sort of *sense* in who it allows in, and who it excludes. And Britain seems to have gone stupid when it comes to making these decisions. Recently there’s been a scandal over the British government making things essentially impossible for Gurkhas who served in the Brit military to take up residence in britain… that’s just nuts. While at the same time, the Brits not only allow Jihadists to stay, they give them welfare, at the British taxpayers expense. From the Daily Mail:
The British government, in releasing the list of 16 people it’s excluding, says it’s “naming and shaming” them. Well, I’ve heard Michael Savage a few times. I don’t much care for him; he reminds me far too much of the talentless, screeching Leftist dirtbags that populate Air America. But this will not “shame” him. Hell, he’ll get off on this… this is Good News for his career. He’ll be able to use this for a little short of forever on his show.
Y’all want to keep him out? Fine. But is he *really* as big a danger to Britain as many of the people y’all let stay?
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/article218174.ece
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/columnists/kavanagh/article1417495.ece
“Come on in! The door’s always open to you lot!”
————-
The Daily Mail adds this:
AND THESE ARE SOME ALLOWED TO STAY IN THE UK:
Abu Quatada
Osama Bin Laden’s top man in the UK. He is in jail fighting an attempt to extradite him to Jordan on terrorism charges.
Learco Chindamo
The 28-year-old, who killed headmaster Stephen Lawrence in 1995, is free to stay in the UK after lawyers claimed that deportation to Italy would ‘breach his right to a family life’.
Ahsan Sabri
A Pakistani illegal immigrant who killed a young writer by driving into her at 60mph, he cannot be deported due to his human right to a family life. Sabri, who had been driving uninsured and unlicenced had married a British woman.
Caliph Ali Asmar
Iraqui Kurd asylum seeker jailed for two years for unlawful wounding. After serving eight months he was released and went on to rape a woman and stab a love rival. He is now in jail indefinitely.
Gary Glitter
Real name Paul Gadd, he served almost three years in prison in Vietnam for sex crimes involving two young girls. The former pop star, who returned to the UK in August, also served two months in jail in 1999 for possessing child pornography.
Dr Philip Nitschke
The euthanasia activist was dubbed ‘Dr Death’ after bringing the first of his suicide workshops to the UK today. Nitschke has helped four people die in his native Australia, but in the UK assisted
A cutaway painting and sideview of an early/mid 1950’s concept from Bell Aircraft for a VTOL jet fighter, using a single turbojet engine and the “Vertiburner” concept:
This design eventually morphed into the D-188 concept which replaced the Vertiburners with discrete liftjets; the D-188 eventually morphed into the D-188A, which has been erroneously labeled the “F-109.”
To see more on this… much more… check out issue V2N3 of Aerospace Projects Review.
I could’ve sworn that I’d posted a link to this video before, but damned if I can find it. Anyway, this is to my mind just about the most powerful “9-11 YouTube” videos I’ve ever seen. If you can sit through it – especially the conversation from 2:50 to 3:01 – and not be moved, there’s something wrong with you.
I believe that the greatest failure of the Bush administration was not the bailouts or the prescription drugs travesties… it was the lack of use of nuclear weapons in the Tora Bora region. When bin Laden was confirmed there, we should *not* have done the diplomatic thing and let our Afghani “allies” try to take the region. We should not have sent in the Marines. We should not have sent in B-52’s with Daisy Cutters. We should have sent in the Peacekeepers and the Tridents, and reduced that mountainous region to fricken’ rubble. America’s response should have been massive enough that, 5,000 years from now, after civilization has fallen and risen and fallen and risen again, people on the Asian continent will still sit around campfires and tell whispered tales of how the foolish imps known as the “taliban” once taunted the great sky-god “America,” and how America struck down with the power of the gods, destroying the taliban utterly… and leaving the area filled with the scattered, broken remnants of the talibans dark evil magic, and that’s why anyone who ventures into that realm of blackened glass gets a sickness.
But instead, we went the “tepid” route. And as a result, the Taliban was never fully wiped out, and is resurgent, and moving into Pakistan in force. The reports are that the Pakistani nuclear program is being closely monitored by the US military, perhaps even having US Special Forces on site, ready to carry off the Pakinukes if the Paki government or military falls. So rather than exterminating the ideological garbage that is the Taliban, we now have to worry about *them* getting nukes.
If you think that nuking a thinly populated mountainous region would be a horrible over-reaction to 9-11… imagine what the US response will be if the Taliban gets nukes and takes out an American city. Or imgaine what the Indian reaction will be if Paki nukes are used on, say, New Delhi.