They got someone for the four Dakota murders. I missed the name, but the cops are charging a student in Pennsylvania. Glad to hear the cops have a suspect. They have not said what evidence they have to charge this guy. Could be anything, tire tracks from the white car, fingerprints in the murder house, bloodstains that have traceable DNA, or anything. I hope whay ever evidence it is, it sticks.
H Beam Piper wrote “Space Viking” way back in 1963. I reread it the other day; Lucas Trask is the Vice Roy ruling a frontier planet on the edge of the old Terran Federation. The Federation crashed centuries before and many of its planets reverted to a pre industrial medieval state. Trask has decided to make Tanith a base for Space Viking. This means getting native workers to do the heavy lifting clearing wreckage from the long abandoned space port, suppressing banditry, establishing a planetary government and so on.
Somewhat later in the story Trask meets up with planet Marduk. Marduk is fully civilized, it maintained its civilization even as the Federation fell. Anyhow Lucas Trask is discussing problems keeping civilization going with a member of the royal family of Marduk. As the discussion goes on, Marduk’s problems sound distressingly similar to the problem we are having in modern day America. This in a science fiction novel written in 1963, 60 years ago.
Black hawk is a conventional helicopter that has been flying for years and is quite satisfactory. Back in 2014 the army asked for a fly off between the Bell Helicopter V280 tilt rotor design and the Sikorsky-Boeing Defiant a more or less conventional design with a pusher propeller for better speed.
After 8 well paid years of testing and tinkering the Army finally picked the Bell V280 which was faster. The V22 Osprey is the only tilt rotor currently in service. It can do 300-400 knots, but large conventional helicopters have better range and bigger payloads. Osprey has a poor safety record, a lot of crashes, some with troops on board and many deaths. It is not clear to me why the services care about speed. In Viet Nam we arranged for the troop carrying helicopters to arrive all at the same time. We had enough troops in the first wave to overwhelm the enemy, especially with gun ships supporting the infantry.
The Bell 280 is flying, at least the Aviation Week article shows it in the air. There is a juicy $7.3 billion of “startup money” for the V280. Actual production of V280’s will cost $70 billion. Aviation Week did not mention how many V280s that $70 billion will buy.
The Army said very little about the contract award, like why they picked Bell. Sikorsky-Boeing is thinking about suing to reverse the contract award. That ought to suck up another year or two.
Face it girls. Men are bigger than you are. They are taller, heavier, and stronger that you are. If you have a long walk to your car after dark, or to your apartment, you ought to think about carrying a gun. “All people were NOT created equal; Sam Colt made them that way.”
You are thinking about a hand gun that can be concealed in a purse, a pocket, a holster, a car glove compartment, a desk drawer, wherever. Hand guns come in two flavors, revolvers and automatic pistols. I recommend revolvers because they are extremely reliable. Pull the trigger and a revolver always goes bang. Automatic pistols not so much.
Handguns are made to shoot a variety of cartridges (bullets) ranging from target practice rounds that would not kill a flea up thru Dirty Harry’s 44 Magnum (“The most powerful handgun on the planet”). You want the most powerful round that you can shoot well. For many people 38 Special is easy to shoot and powerful enough to do the job. The more powerful the round, the worse the recoil and the louder the report. You want the go to a shooting range and actually fire the round you are thinking about and see how hard it is to shoot. While you are at the range see how well the gun fits your hand. I learned to shoot in the Air Force where the issue revolver was a miserable to shoot 38 special. The trigger was too heavy, the grip was not big enough to get all my fingers around it, and the wooden grips had been soaked in gun oil for 20 years and were slippery. The gun twisted in my hand after each shot. Later I acquired an Army .45 and it shot like a dream. Try to shoot a number of different guns, you may find one that shoots better for you than the others.
Two things about shooting. Always wear ear defenders, those bulky plastic earmuffs, ESPECIALLY on an indoor gun range. Without ear defenders the report is so loud that it can scare you into a permanent flinch, where in you squeeze the trigger too fast and too hard and miss the target. The other thing is to shoot a hand gun with BOTH hands. This is the Weaver technique which became standard in the late 1960’s and it improved my shooting a lot.
You need to get out and shoot your gun for practice if you expect to hit anything for real. Squeeze the trigger gently so that it is something of a surprised when the gun actually fires. Line up the front and back sight over the target bulls eye. Take a small breath and they hold it while you line up the sights and squeeze the trigger. When you get home from the range clean your gun, especially the inside of the barrel and cylinder. Wrap your gun in an oily rag when you put it away to prevent rust.
We got 7 inches of fresh snow last night. Nice fluffy powder. That will put the mountain in great shape. And it is still snowing as of 7:30 AM.
They have been talking about a court ordered repeal of Title
42 as another disaster on the southern border.
Title 42 was something CDC got passed requiring the Border Patrol to
immediately send back to Mexico
anyone who might be bringing COVID into the US. The talk says repealing Title 42 will swamp
us with yet more undocumented immigrants.
This discussion seems like malarkey to me. Anyone crossing into the United
States lacking proper paperwork should be
immediately returned to where they came.
No Title 42 required. If they
have not gotten proper paperwork from a US
consulate abroad or a US Customs station on the border, out they go. Right
now.
What’s so hard about that?
Start at the top, fire Wray. Fire the next three levels of management. Prosecute them if possible. Cut the FBI appropriation in half. They have too many people. Sell all the FBI's aircraft. When FBI people travel they can fly commercial, like the rest of us do. Repeal the law making lying to the FBI a crime.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel blamed the “red trickle” in the mid term elections on “massive ticket splitting”. Ticket splitting is not a cause for defeat. The cause for Republican defeat is candidates that failed to impress voters.
Do we still need an RNC Chairman who lacks such basic understanding of elections?
Parents want to make sure their children know that street drugs will kill. Fentanyl is cheap and extremely powerful. So powerful that the slightest error in mixing fentanyl with other ingredients leaves a pill with enough fentanyl to kill. A few months ago a survey of street drugs showed that one in six pills bough on the street had enough fentanyl to kill. A later survey a few weeks ago showed things were worse. This survey found that one in a mere three pills bought off the street had enough fentanyl to kill you. The newsies will call it an “overdose”. I call it deliberate poisoning.
Anyhow, you ought to tell your kids that street drugs will kill them. If they just have to get high they ought to stick to alcohol or pot. They are safer than street drugs.
Up until Dec 7 1941 America was controlled by isolationists who believed we should stay out of any foreign wars, no matter what. Isolationists pointed to Versailles Peace Treaty that ended World War 1. Despite serious American participation on the Allied side, we did not get anything much from the Versailles treaty. Mostly this was because the Versailles Treaty mostly concerned divvying up European colonies between the winners. After suppressing the Philippine insurrection before WW1 we had little interest in obtaining more overseas colonies. The Philippines taught us that running a colony is expensive, in lives, in money, and reputation. There was still plenty of unsettled land in the West to settle countless farmers on. Up until Pearl Harbor the United States was solidly against any kind of military action, anywhere. We knew that Japan was doing quite a bit of aggression in the East, gobbling up bit parts of China, Manchuria, and other tasty parts of the Far East. We disapproved. We send Japan a series of diplomatic notes, (nasty grams) letting them know we disapproved. But no way were we gong to go farther than nasty grams.
Things drifted on, and we got more difficult. We finally stopped selling crude oil and
scrap steel to Japan. Many historians said after the war that the
embargoes on oil and steel forced Japan
to do Pearl Harbor.
This is not true. The Dutch
East Indies had (still have) plenty of oil. The Nazis had just invaded and occupied the Netherlands,
which left the Dutch East Indies just hanging in the
wind. Japan
could have sent a fleet of tankers, and some bankers with thick check books to
the Indies and they could have bought all the oil Japan
would need for years. And scrap steel
is easy to buy, in most places it ranks as ugly junk and people are happy to
find someone to haul it away.
Instead Japan
decided to declare war on America
and deal us a heavy blow. The Japanese
government thought that after a solid blow the Americans would sue for
peace. Serious misunderstanding #1. After taking a blow Americans never sue for
peace, they get mad and start breaking things and enemies. Most of Japan’s
government leaders had never been to America,
did not speak English, and had no idea of whom or what they were dealing
with. The one exception was Admiral
Yamamoto. He had done college at
Harvard, served as Japan’s
naval attaché in DC, spoke English, played poker, and traveled throughout America. Too bad few people in Japan
listened to him. When they asked
Yamamoto how the war with America
would turn out he said “for the first six months we shall run wild. But after six months I have no confidence at
all.”
Yamamoto had it right. Within 6 months of Pearl Harbor we met the Japanese navy at Midway and sank four of the Japanese carriers. Japan never recovered from that blow.
Open borders gets us a flood of Mexican and South American immigrants. Do democrats believe these immigrants will vote democrat? Give them a majority somewhere? How long will it take for illegal immigrants to become registered American voters? Five years? Ten years? That’s a long time to wait for new democrat votes. Are democrats that patient? Or do the democrats have some scam to get illegal immigrants registered to vote inside of a year?
Or do democrats think we need a lot of low cost labor? Employers think so, but every illegal immigrant hired puts a real American citizen out of a job. Those losers were the dependable democrat voters. Will they stay democrat voters while on unemployment?
Or is there some other reason to want a flood of illegal immigrants?
