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In honor of PalmPilot manservant of PalmTreePundit.
Something caught the corner of my eye today. Watching the fire season wars out west, I saw a couple of familiar figures flying across my screen.
The great submarine hunters from WWII through today are still serving in another unending war. Fighting fires. Just some cool eye candy for those plane nuts.
All Navy planes, of course.....
PBY from WWII fame .
PB4Y2 (just retired from tanking a couple of years ago)
S-2 Tracker
P-2V Neptune
P-3 Orion
There are a couple of good sites about these firefighting tankers. airtanker.com (make sure and look on the "Tankers" page for the goodies). oldprops.com has some great photos, most non-tanker related. As a reminder that fighting these fires has a cost, see this memorial. The last loss was a P-3 this April. USN P-3 should be with us through 2018 and some countries still fly the S-2 and P-2V, but I think all will be fighting fires for a few more decades.
I know I am going to loose some of you here, but freedom isn’t free.
The flag burning amendment passed by the House yesterday is just stupid. IMAO we should always err on the side OF freedom, not AGAINST freedom. Just speaking for myself, my years of service are not insulted or wounded because some clueless, undereducated, patchouli oil covered, over-pierced folks whose daddy didn’t love them enough decide to burn a flag. What are there, a dozen or so here in the U.S.?
We are a bigger, better, and more secure country than to think this VERSION OF SPEECH needs to be made illegal via an amendment to the Constitution. That is just asinine. What form of speech in next? Political Cartoons? Presidential Jokes? MilBlogs?
Let them burn the Flag, it will let us know who ate lead paint chips as a child. They need help.
I have disagreed more often than I wish with The Commissar after he took his “break” and shifted away from the black background and red font, but he is still one of the better, level headed bloggers out there – I would still unquestionably buy that guy a beer and invite him to a 4th of July picnic.
As is his nature, he is right on target WRT this.The flag desecration amendment is an empty gesture. The overblown patriotic tone here was mocking the Left's attack on the "non-co-sponsors" of the anti-lynching bill. For the Left and Right to put forth resolutions, which then give them convenient hooks to attack those who don't "do the right thing" is annoying.
Make sure and read the whole post though. The Commissar goes “old school” with the mocking in the beginning.
Well done Comrade!
UPDATE----UPDATE
So, you love freedom? You love this country? Feel a need to adjust the Constitution? Expend your efforts towards a real threat to liberty. SHAME ON SOUTER, BREYER, GINSBURG, STEVENS, AND KENNEDY. Lets draft an amendment to overturn this bucket of FOD coming out of SCOTUS. Thanks to these enlightened "Justices," gov'munt now has the power to take one citizens property to enrich another. That is not what happens in a free country. That is a real threat to what people have given their lives for. The Commissar is all over that as well.
UPDATE II - Electric Boogaloo: OK, maybe I'm not alone in the trench here. I see Scott over there sharpening his bayonet, my dear Bookie is on the other side of me nodding at the Vast Right Wing Mortar Squad, and it looks like The Commissar is standing on top of the trench lines, screaming like a madman at the enemy, giving them a good taunting. I feel better. Great company.
…..the first thing he asked when he was pulled from the canal (the blast blew him into a canal) was: "Be honest with me, guys. Do I still have my face and my 'package'?"
Army Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss of From My Position... On the way! was wounded in Iraq on 21 JUN by an IED. His wife Carren has an update on his condition here. The Executive Summary from Landstuhl:He will have another surgery tomorrow. These are the "basics" of his injuries, although none of them are fun to talk about.
1. He has severe nerve damage in his left hand and has lost his left pinky (all of it). It will be a long recovery for his hand due to the nerve damage.
2. His right thumb is pretty messed up and the docs are not sure how much he will lose or keep... he may be okay and keep his thumb, we just don't know yet.
3. ALL of his internal organs are okay. One of his lungs is bruised, but not damaged.
4. His brain, spine, and neck are all okay... paralysis is not an issue.
5. He has no muscle damage in his legs or arms, but his right thigh has been damaged.
6. His face was "peppered" by shrapnel. He has a cut on his right cheek, which has been stitched up.
Carren sounds like a woman the best deserve. She says something to you-know-who out there lurking in the MilBlogger realm.For those who may be thinking, "We just need to bring all the troops home and forget this war," let me tell a quick story.
As you know I told Creighton that his daddy was hurt and that he will be okay and coming home soon. One of the questions he asked was, "Why did Daddy have to go so far away to get the bad guys?" I said, "Daddy had to go far away to fight the bad guys so we are safe here in the US. We don't want the bad guys to be here in our country, so brave men and women like Daddy go far away to make sure that never happens." (A side note... a 5 year old is too young to understand that bad guys are here in the US and managed to do some serious damage on 9/11).
Godspeed Chuck. Hat tip Blackfive.
OK, I know Michael Crook and forsakethetroops.net is old news, but I had to put this in; I had not seen the video until yesterday. You have to see it. Both Hannity and Colmes nail that clueless bucket of FOD. It really is a hoot to see; but remember one thing. There are a lot of Moonbats that think just like he does – and they vote.
A launch was detected about 80nm north of Severmorsk. The Russian, American, and Czech tracking stations confirm the launch from the Delta III Borisoglebsk (K-496) at 1946 UTC.I’m just pulling your leg….kind of. All the above is true, it just happened. The same boat that hit the USS Grayling in 1993 launched a SLBM. This time though, it was just 1. Not 16. No MIRVs. It kept going with its payload. Up. Up. …. and into the age of sail.Solar sail. A solar sail is a spacecraft without an engine - it is pushed along directly by light particles from the Sun, reflecting off giant mirror-like sails. Because it carries no fuel and keeps accelerating over almost unlimited distances, it is the only technology now in existence that can one day take us to the stars.
Cosmos 1 has 8 triangular sails, each 15 meters (50 feet) in length, configured around the spacecraft's body at the center. The sails will be deployed by inflatable tubes once the spacecraft is in orbit.
The spacecraft will be launched from a submerged Russian submarine in the Barents Sea. It will be carried into orbit on board a Volna rocket - a converted ICBM left over from the old Soviet arsenal.
Read all about it. Cool. PS: Be honest: is some ways you miss the Cold War, don't you? RECCO Test #1: (see 'Viewgraph') Identify ship. "Knife in back; lip on stack; hotdog pack; it's a _____." First correct response gets a 72 hr liberty pass over any 3-day weekend.
UPDATE: In the finest traditions of the Soviet/Russian Naval service; things did not go off that well. Contact was lost shortly after lift-off. They think they found its signal in orbit but are not sure. Here is the "interesting" thing. The US Space Command states it can't find it. I hope that the thing never made orbit and the signal is a fluke, or that there is some OPSEC thing going on here; because if a clapped out Russian SSBN can launch a clapped out SLBM from a know location at a known time on a know trajectory and we cannot track it..... Well, you do the math.
Pope Benedict XVI makes a no-holds-barred challenge to Europe in his first book published since becoming pope, going after a fallen culture.
The hits are direct, firm, and air tight.``Europe has developed a culture which, in a way never before known to humanity, excludes God from public conscience, either by being denied or by judging his existence to be uncertain and thus belonging to subjective choices, something irrelevant for public life,'' Benedict writes.
He dismisses arguments that inclusion of the reference would have offended Jews and Muslims, saying they are more offended by Europe's attempt to deny a historic fact.
``It's not the mention of God that offends the followers of other religious, but precisely the attempt to build a human community absolutely without God,'' he writes.
The Pope is right on target there. Even an Islamofascist will have some grudging respect for a devout Christian or Jew. Someone that denies God is the lowest of the low for them; they will have nothing for contempt for that person. An Indidel has some status; and Apostate none.Written before he became Pope, the book provides some insight on why he chose Benedict.He says Europe needs more people like St. Benedict of Norcia, the fifth and sixth century monk who is a patron saint of Europe. The Benedictine order that followed his teachings became the main guardian of learning and literature in Western Europe during the dark centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.
I don't know or read Italian (the language of the book "The Europe of Benedict: In the crisis of cultures"), not am I a Catholic; but I want to read this book. I think we can get a peek at what the book will look like from some quotes from a speech then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger gave at a conference held on April 1, 2005, at the Monastery of St. Scholastica, Subiaco, Italy.It's true that today there exists a new moralism whose key terms are justice, peace, and conservation of creation -- words that recall to us essential moral values of which we truly have a need. But this moralism remains vague and slippery, almost inevitably so, in the sphere of party-politics. Such a moralism is before all else a pretense for others, and too little a personal duty of our daily life. In fact, what does "justice" signify? Who defines it? Of what utility is peace? In recent decades we have seen amply enough in our streets and in our piazzas how pacifism can deviate toward a destructive anarchism and toward terrorism. The political moralism of the 70's, whose roots have not yet died, was a moralism which succeeded to fascinate even those youth filled with idealism. But it was a moralism with the wrong address, inasmuch as it was deprived of serene reasoning and because, in the last analysis, it put a utopian political order above the dignity of the individual man, showing itself capable of arriving, in the name of its grand objectives, to devalue man. Political moralism, as we have seen and as we still experience, does not only fail to open the path to regeneration, but blocks it. The same is true, consequently, of a christianity and of a theology which reduces the core of the message of Jesus, the "Kingdom of God", to "values of the Kingdom", identifying these values with the great terms of the order of political moralism, and proclaiming them, at the same time, as the synthesis of religions;
This brief look at the situation of the world brings us to reflect upon the present situation of Christendom, and hence also upon the foundations of Europe . . . If Christendom, on one hand, has found its own, most efficacious expression in Europe, one needs to say, on the other hand, that in Europe there has developed a culture which constitutes itself in the most radical manner not only as the contradiction of Christendom, but of the religious and moral traditions of humanity. From this, one understands that Europe is truly and actually undertaking a "driver's test" from which one understands the radicality of the tensions which our continent must confront. But here there emerges also and above all else the responsibility which we Europeans must assume in this historic moment: in the internal debate regarding the definition of Europe, within the new political form, one is not playing at some nostalgically regarded action of history, but rather a great responsibility for today's humanity. ...
The true contrariety which characterizes the world of today is not that among diverse religious cultures, but that between the radical emancipation of man from God, from the roots of life, on the one hand, and the great religious cultures on the other. If there arrives a conflict of cultures, it will not be through a conflict of the great religions -- forever one against the others, but, in the end, which have always known how to live one with the other -- but it will be through the conflict between this radical emancipation of man and the great historic cultures.
...the refusal of a reference to God is not an expression of tolerance which wants to protect non-theistic religious and the dignity of atheists and agnostics, but rather is an expression of a conscience which would want to see God definitively cancelled out of the public life of man and chained in the subjective ambit of the residues of past cultures.
Yep, the Pope is a hundred-pound-head type. Woe be to the Eurocrat that tries to intellectually spar with that man.
At long last, Senator Kerry signed out his Form 180 to release his military records. Powerline had them first, and go there to look at them. Fairly straight forward. Funny thing is where he sent them. There are three Form 180s out there, each having Senator Kerry's long lost/hidden records sent to different places. 20MAY05 to Michael Krimish at The Boston Globe (hard to tell, the Senator’s penmanship is, well, not up to Yale standards)26MAY05 to Glen Johnson at The Associated Press06JUN05 to Steve Braun at The LA Times Mmmm. I didn’t see Fox News there anywhere.
As a recidivist Staff Weenie and Admin Queen, just want you to know you are not going to see anything shocking here. A Form 180 just authorizes the release of records. No news will come out until the people that receive the records go through them. Looking forward to seeing what they find….
