The Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., has the name of every American killed in that war. The World War II memorial does not have the acreage for such a thing. Instead, it has one rather large wall covered in stars; each star represents 100 Americans killed fighting in WWII.
Located on the grounds of the Museum of Aviation near Robins Air Force Base in Georgia is one of the YMC-130H Credible Sport testbeds. Credible Sport was, to put it mildly, one of the sportier variants of the C-130. Intended specifically for a rescue mission of the American hostages held by the Iranians, Credible Sport was designed for near VTOL operations, to land and take off within the confines of a soccer stadium. In order to do this, the aircraft was liberally festooned with solid rocket motors. Eight were located near the front of the plane, with their nozzles pointing forward; at the instant the plane touched down, they would fire and slam the plane to a halt. Eight more pointed down, and more pointed aft; at takeoff, the downward rockets would provide enough thrust to launch the plane vertically skyward, while the aft rockets would push it forward. By the time they burned out, the plane would be going fast enough so that the conventional turboprops would be able to maintain forward flight.
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The program came to a halt when one of the test planes crashed… the braking rockets were meant to be fired after touchdown, not when the plane was still 20 feet in the air. Ooops.
The specifics of the mission as a whole are a bit murky. At least two Credible Sports would be used to deliver Delta Force commandos and to haul out the hostages; but there would also be considerable backup by other aircraft from the US Navy and Air Force. I had a friend who was in the Air Force at the time (“The Jimmy Carter Peacetime Fly-In Club” as he called it), maintaining B-52’s on Guam. And the night of the Eagle’s Talon/Desert One fiasco, the follow-up operation that followed in the aftermath of the failure of the Credible Sport, all the B-52’s were put on high alert and fully loaded with ordnance. Seems likely that the idea was to extract the hostages and then transform Tehran – and likely large parts of the rest of Iran – into fields of rubble reminiscent of WWII Hamburg. Had this gone off as planned, Reagan might not have been elected until 1984.
More photos after the “continue reading…”
We made a brief blast through Washington, D.C. Generally it’s a city to avoid, but it has a few locations of note. One of particular interest to me and members of my family is the Viet Nam War Memorial. It cannot be bypassed. There are several names on it that merit attention, and they are always located and noted.
The day we visited it was dreary and raining. I took a number of photos from various angles. Below is a view from below, looking up at one name in particular.
Little reported on in the West is religious violence in places like Thailand, where apparently several thousand Buddhist civilains have been butchered in the last several months by members of Another Religion. Guess which one. Hint: it ain’t the Quakers.
For those who would not have gotten squeamish at photos of a dead bin Laden, HERE is a video of the aftermath of a religious assault on a Buddhist Thai family. I would not have thought that the body of a skinny nine-year-old would have contained so much blood, but I guess when you chop the head off you open up all kinds of avenues for it to spill out.
I wouldn’t have thought that the patently obvious would need to be defended, but I guess sometimes it does. Consider:
Should feminists be embracing the word ‘slut’?
Wherein we discover that self-professed “feminists” are pissed off at a Toronto policeman who told women that to avoid sexual assault, they should avoid dressing like sluts. These particualr feminists are using their artifical rage about this to help gin up more artificial rage (and very likely, funds).
Now, before the knee-jerkists start screeching, those guilty of rape need to be fired. Out of a gun. Into the sun. Anyone who, lets face it, tortures those weaker than them for no better reason than they get off on it are a detriment to society and the gene pool. But this does not mean that potential victims of rape should rely on nothing more than the fact that rape is both wrong and illegal to protect themselves from it.
If you are a pedestrian at a pedestrian crosswalk and the “walk” sign is lit… yes, you have the right to walk across the road unimpeded. But if there is a Mack truck bearing down on the intersection at 60 miles per hour with no brakes and a drunk driver talking on a cell phone… your right to walk across the road should take a back seat to seeing the wisdom of Backing The Hell Up. If you are a blond blue-eyed white guy, you have every right to walk down the streets of Compton or Watts wearing a “The Confederacy Had The Right Idea” tee-shirt while waving around handfulls of $100 bills without being accosted. If you are the blackest black man ever, you have the right to have a “Jefferson Davis was a pansy”-themed picnic in the park, even if the Klan happens to be holding a rally there. You have the *right.* But the universe doesn’t give a damn about your “rights.” Thugs don’t give a damn about your rights. Drunk idiots don’t give a damn about your rights. Often enough the cops or the government as a whole don’t give a damn about your rights. Get yourself mugged on the streets with a hundred witnesses, and you’ll find that often enough, *they* don’t give enough of a damn about your rights to help you (but sometimes, they do).
So… yeah. It is *not* “blaming the victim” to tell women tht “dressing like sluts” is a potentially unwise thing to do. It is just good advice. Just as it’s good advice to advise women to refrain from attending frat parties and drinking themselves into a stupor (again, their right to do so) or to walk city streets at night unarmed (once again, their right to do so) or to go to Certain Foreign Countries.
But it seems that these days if you suggest that someone refrain from doing something, you must be an evil anti-womanist (or whatever group happens to be professionally offended at the time). But that is not even remotely the case. As I’ve mentioned, politically I am a “small-l” libertarian. This means that, generally speaking, you can do whatever the hell you like, so long as you don’t harm others or demand that I pay for it… or pay for the consequences. This means that if you want to smoke tobacco or do meth or roll around naked on broken glass or taunt Crips, you should have the legal right to do so. But this is a wholly separate thing from me saying that any of these are *good* or *wise* things to do, and I’d counsel against doing any of them. With rights come responsibilities. And these responsibilities include making reasonable attempts at avoiding doing really dumb things.
Just west of Denver, right at the base of the foothills, there is a recycling center. And just at the entrance of the recycling center there’s an incinerator; during the day, nothing seems to be happening, but after nightfall a distinctive blue flame can be seen shooting out of the top of it (as previously seen HERE).
Through random chance, on my pass through Denver the Moon was in a position to be easily seen right next to or behind the blue flame. Two nights provided two different atmospheric conditions… the first night was cloudy, with a barely-visible crescent moon; the second night was clear.
A long exposure showing the incinerator exhaust stack:
More photos available below.
While driving down the highway in the south a week or more ago, I tried several times to take photos of the passing trees. Not because the trees made all that exciting of an image, but because for many hundreds of miles, the trees lining the sides of the road were *all* you could see. For all I knew, a hundred feet beyond were vast deserts, or rolling hills, or beer volcanoes and stripper factories. Just couldn’t tell. But sticking a camera out an automobile window at 65 miles per hour and trying to snap a clear photo of trees ten feet away turned out to be a losing proposition. Any photo fast enough to capture the leaves clearly was too dark to be anywhere near “good.” So, what the hell, I tried the opposite approach: close down the aperture as far as it’d go, drop the ISO to the minimum value, and take long exposures. Would’ve worked better with a neutral density filter (think: sunglasses) over the lens, but at the time it was not readily accessible.
A Bell Aerospace painting of a not-final design of the X-22. The X-22 was a VTOL technology testbed; having seen it up close, it is remarkably small, and it worked reasonably well. Bell had hopes that it would serve as the basis of a Tri-Service transport (such as the D-2022 and D-2064 shown in upper right HERE), but the technology went no further. It would be interesting to ponder what an assault on Osamas compound might’ve looked like had the assault craft been evolved, stealthed X-22 derivatives. Noise would have been a major concern, though. To first order, an air jet that provides a constant level of thrust gets louder the smaller the diameter gets. Thus a vast helicopter blade would make a low “whop-whop” noise, while a small ducted prop like on the X-22 would make a loud roar… and a rocket engine would scream and turn nearby witnesses brains into Silly Putty.
Compare this artwork to this earlier-posted B&W painting, and this similar concept.
Huh. According to This Here German website (http://www.bildblog.de/30123/deep-space-six/) and it’s Google Translation:
When trying to viewers over every little detail to inform, came the news channel N24 yesterday at noon and in the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group in the campaign against Osama bin Laden was involved in the. Better known is the special unit of the U.S. Navy under its old name of SEAL Team Six.
After moderator Mick Locher spoken in detail about the training, equipment and capabilities of the Navy SEALs (the “So who were armed to the teeth.”), Appears to direct a following logo:
Undeterred, he continues Locher:
And they also have this Six team that carried out this mission. Since one can not free the skull has the skull emblem.
And it goes even further with an animated simulation of the operation.
But let’s look a little closer to this emblem: an eagle with a phaser , a trident, a three bat’leth framed Klingon skull, the word ” MAQUIS SPECIAL OPERATIONS
The logo, the N24 has shown, and perhaps a Google image search on “SEAL Team Six” days promoted to, comes from the Star Trek fan wiki Maquis Forces International .
Awesome.
A link to the logo:
http://wiki.maquis.com/w/Image:Seals-Team6.jpg
So not only was it Star Fleet… it was *amateur* ex-Star Fleet. I’ll bet Garak was involved.
