Hmmmmmmm?

What’s not to love about this:

How anyone can read history and still believe in political messiahs is beyond me. The fact that it has become possible to graduate from even our most prestigious colleges and universities, still fundamentally ignorant of history, may have much to do with our electing a political messiah to the White House– for which we, our children and grandchildren will pay dearly.

Borrowed from my Sister at Pixie Place II. The above is from Thomas Sowell.

Flag Counter Thingy

Been messing with it.  Then had password and regeneration issues.
Starting over. The story of my life at times.

Update, again

Got the Missus out of Bakersfield Memorial after the angiogram. Small amount of arterial plaque. No stent required. Good thing.
My event for tomorrow is cancelled here and will be in another location on next Monday. The place here in Bakersfield has business practices that are suspect when using Tricare Standard-Retired such as I have. They wanted 223 bucks up front which according to Tricare is illegal.
But The Missus will get a chance to rest. The nurses didn't want her sitting in a car for the trip back over the mountain right away.

About that first woman executed in the US in 5 years

Pause for thought on this one. And thanks to Warner Todd, I swiped it from Stop the ACLU.

-By Warner Todd Huston




OK, the story is all over the Old Media edifice: forty-one-year-old Teresa Lewis has become “the first woman to be executed in the U.S. in five years.”



Every news outlet from TV and cable, to newspapers, to radio, to the Internet is using this line, this “the first woman to be executed in the U.S. in five years” line. They are all playing the same narrative.



So, here’s the question I have. How exactly can anyone be the “first” anything “in five years”? Doesn’t the whole “in five years” presuppose that someone else came first? See, the one “five years” ago was at the very least the real first one, not the one that came today. And in this case, the real “first” woman executed came over a hundred years ago.



See that woman was Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt. And that is only the “official” version of events because one could easily count those women hanged for being witches in the famed Salem Witch Trials way back in the 1600s (though this country wasn’t quite “the United States” yet, granted).



Why, then, is this language being used? Why so that this murderer’s execution somehow sounds like a bad thing, that’s why. If we say “the first one in five years,” we make it all seem so outrageous, so shocking. And that heightened emotion is applied to the execution making many people feel that it is somehow untoward.



The truth is, though, that this woman got what she deserved. There is nothing at all untoward in her elimination from society. She does not deserve the distinction of being known as any “first” anything.



And as the Old Media establishment tsk tsks America after executing a woman that confessed to her crime, underwent an extensive trial with proper representation, and saw years of court procedures, can we remember what is going on elsewhere?



How about the 1983 hanging of ten women by the Iranian regime? Why were they murdered by the mad mullahs? Because they dared believe in the Baha’i faith, a religion that Iranian authorities had banned. One was only 17 years old and was tortured by the Iranians before she was hanged.



But, heck, we don’t have to go all the way back to 1983. Women are commonly raped, murdered, and executed by hanging and stoning by the “religion of peace.”



Then there are the hundreds of thousands of women held in North Korean gulags, the hundreds of thousands held in Chinese prison camps, the many thousands held in Cuba’s prisons…. the U.S. executes one admitted murderer and we are the evil ones while these other “respected” nations do this sort of thing on a daily basis and no one says a word.



Excuse me if I don’t feel so bad for Teresa Lewis.

 Ah, perspective rears it's ugly head again. Seems that this makes us the "bad guys" again?

BP Bloodwork results

Got the letter today. Everything looks normal. The Triglycerides are up but that is it.
Still waiting on the referral for both the hernia and the kidney scan thing.
Much better news today!

BP update

152 over 102. Did a full blood work, EKG and Chest X-ray. The nurse took four tubes of blood and I had to pee in a cup.
We are beginning the process to get a scan of the remaining kidney. There is a possiblity that the arteries to the remaining one may not be of adequate size. This will require the dye in the blood stream. If it is small then a stent will need to be installed.
And I still need a hernia repair!

Railroad Tracks are this wide because..............funny, sort of.

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.


Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the US railroads.

...Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.

Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?' , you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)　

Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah

The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

　
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything... and

CURRENT Horses Asses in Washington DC are controlling everything else

Sad places for airplane guys, addendum

Another sort of famous resident of the "Storage area" at Mojave Airport.
This is the Gimli Glider. It is on Wikipedia. That is the entire story. Go check it out.

A coworker of mine was working for the storage management company and was on the crew that took all the markings off.

Ex C-GAUN The Gimli Glider.

Last time I went by it was missing the engines. Word has it from my friend Dwight that she is due to be scrapped.
But the newer ones from Boeing and even Airbus are so much better in terms of the systems installed.

Speaking of Airbus, these A330s have found new homes. Of the six that were here, three of them were at a hangar on the south side of the field in front of a large hangar. They had been there through the winter and into the summer. Less chance of corrosion as they are of mostly composite construction.

Sad Places for airplane guys

VCV-Southern California Logistics Airport. Former George AFB

Boneyard. This is a photo from various newspapers after the initial economic meltdown last year. When passing by Victorville and Adelanto on the way to Oceanside we see this very view. That Joshua Tree is next to US 395.

Mojave Air and Space Port. This is an older photo of ex-Air Canada B767s. I see these airplanes on a regular basis. It is on the way to Rosamond, Lancaster, Palmdale and other points south. One of them is the "renowned Gimli Glider" These airplanes are due to be scrapped after all usable items are stripped.
Boneyards. Where Airplanes go to die.
I read a blurb on Airliners.net that the first Frontier Airbus A318 is on it's way to Mississippi to be parted out and scrapped. We are talking a fairly new airplane.
Here at Falcon, we are getting an F-16D ready to go to AMARG at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson. Even we get rid of them!

The Wicked Jester

Clothing site with other stuff. Can be rude, crude and socially unacceptable. I like it. Go figure.

Wicked Jester is the place to go!