June 2010 – Page 3 – The Unwanted Blog

From February, 1940, a concept similar to the B-25 “Mitchell” bomber from North American, but somewhat cleaner, aerodynamically. As designed, with a minimum of defensive armament, limited solely to a tail-turret.

As previously mentioned, I’m not a Christian. Christian evangelizers generally annoy me. That said, just because something is annoying is no reason to make it illegal… and we *do* ahve this thing called a “Constitution.” And for the most part, while my non-Christian-ness might (and often has) gotten me dirty looks and nasty words, it’s been since grade school that anyone has decided that violence was an appropriate response to the concept.

But Dearborn, Michigan, seems to be taking a different view on the subject. It is of course important to keep in mind the biases of the sources of information here, but the basic facts are this:

4 missionaries arrested at Dearborn festival

Four Christian missionaries trying to convert Muslims were arrested and jailed Friday for disorderly conduct at the Arab festival in Dearborn, police said.

“We did make four arrests for disorderly conduct,” Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad said Saturday. “They did cause a stir.”

And here is the website of the missionionaries. The descriptions of the events do not indicate that the missionaries were acting in an illegal manner (again, though, consider the source).

It cannot be said that we were arrested for causing a disturbance, because we did not approach anyone, rather everyone with whom we spoke first approached us. It cannot be said that we were harassing anyone, because the moment anyone said “stop talking to me”, we would stop talking to them. And it cannot be said that we were spreading hate speech, because we said virtually nothing about Islam at all. On the contrary, we repeatedly affirmed our love for all Muslims. Whenever I was asked “Why would you love me?” I said “Because Jesus loves you, and he told me to love you.”

No hating, no disturbing, no harassing… It remains only to be concluded that we were arrested simply for being Christian Preachers at the Arab Festival in Dearborn.

It could of course be that the missionaries were acting like pushy jackasses, in which case a “disorderly conduct” arrest might be warranted. But it seems just as likely that events transpired more or less as described… and the disorderliness came from those opposed to the missionaries. “Disorderly conduct” is a nicely vague accusation, and “They did cause a stir” even more so.

Now, consider this hypothetical… a “European Festival” in, say, Peoria, Illinois. Someone shows up with a bunch of Muslim handouts, and calmly and peacefully wanders around handing out leaflets and talking to people. Would there be violence? Possible, though it seems unlikely. But it seems that in Dearborn, “Arab” equals “Muslim.” Ask yourselves this, if any dirty hippies are reading this, does violence seem to follow Islam? In which case, at an “Arab festival” in a region that has seen a massive influx of Muslim immigrants, would it be just possible that the cops arrested the Christians not because *they* were disorderly, but because the crowd was?

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Oh, and on a completley different subject. Are you feeling that you don’t have enough bloody videos in your day? Well, have I got the answer for you! There is a holiday in Islam called Ashura, the recognition of the day that Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Mohammad, was killed in 680 CE. For the Shi’a Muslims, Ashura oftentimes means the practice of zanjeer… whipping themselves to a bloody pulp with whips, and the extra-fun practice of taking knives and cutting the tops of heads of themselves and children so that blood goes fricken everywhere. What’s not to like?

Well, here ya go, some videos of people whipping themselves bloody for Ashura:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk9-WdPPzr8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kej_3QO-sD0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx6T2hfwH_E

… and so on. This is a seven part series of videos. What’s extra fun: this was in New York City.

I stitched together about seven photos taken of the Milky Way last September. Given that some of them were kinda badly crapped up (and there was a hell of a lot of light pollution), this came out reasonably well.

Here‘s a followup to this.

The good news:

The Chattanooga Police officer [Officer James Daves] who was accused of interfering with a man trying to bring his wife to the hospital last week has been placed on paid administrative leave. … Because of the nature of the charges, he has now been suspended from Erlanger without pay until the matter is resolved.

And where the story gets *worse:*

The most damning claim in the story happened when Jesse was told by Daves to turn himself into the Hamilton County Jail, where he would be charged with a felony. Jesse claims that when he asked what felony he would be charged with, Daves said “I’ll think of something you sh– head.”

Officer Friendly.

In 1963, Convair floated the idea of a Saturn V first stage modified to be in like with their “Nexus” thinking. It was to be a fully recoverable, very squat stage, with little apart from the F-1 engines in common with the standard S-IC stage… and even the F-1’s were uprated.

The cylindrical propellant tanks were done away with; the LOX tank was formed by a roughly conical, round-ended tank on the centerline, while the kerosene tank was repaced by a series of intersecting spherical tanks forming a torus wrapped around the LOX tank. Flaps were added to the conical sides of the stage to control re-entry and descent. The F-1 engines were to be uprated by 20%.
l
(At least)) Two upper stages were envisioned… a modified S-II stage of increased diameter (50 rather than 33 feet) and reduced length, and a 56-foot-diameter nuclear stage equipped with a single 3,000,000 pound-thrust gas-core nuclear thermal rocket engine. Baseline mission for the nuclear version was to lob 920,000 pounds of payload onto a 40,000 ft/sec parabolic (Earth escape) orbit. Different mission velocities could be achieved by lengthening or shortening the nuclear stage hydrogen tank.

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Last autumn, I spent a great deal of time trying to take a good, bright photo of the Milky Way, of the kind you can see here. My efforts produced some pictures that were at best “meh.” Try as I might, I just couldn’t get the sort of brightness and clarity that I was seeing in other photographers work. *Especially* annoying was the failure to come anywhere near something like this.

A few days back I visited Logan, and wandered through the art festival held in the park. There were a number of photographers there, including several who did night-shots such as those… one who had a *lot* of really quite remarkable Milky Way shots. I pestered him about how he did it… while his answers were understandably a little lean on the specifics, the general thrust was that, apart from a motorized sky-tracking mount, he wasn’t doing much of anything that I wasn’t. Apparently it was all in the post-processing.

So, what the hell. I pulled up one of my best, from last August:

Yeah, it’s nice, I suppose, but really pretty faint. So… a smidgeon of fade correction:

Holy crap.

And here, another approach adjusting hue saturation and lightness:

I think I’m on to something here. While there’s a ways to go yet before I can claim to have a really good Milky Way shot (not least of the way being I need to get the hell away from ATK and their light pollution), I think I’m on the right track.

Instead, it appears they are making themselves at home.

Caught on video. NSFW audio, but the video itself is really quite impressive in the destruction shown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlGsNN7TPrc

A Consolidated Aircraft painting dated3-26-1942 showing a head-on view of the Model 36, the preliminary design of the B-36. Note the conventional cockpit glazing and the twin tails.