Donward

Weaponize every 747, 737, LeerJet and Piper Cub now!

There is a certain amount of beauty and truth when you find that your buddy has written a story about the Federal Government spending $5 million in order to dissuade hipsters from smoking. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/04/06/the-nih-is-spending-5-million-to-discourage-hipsters-from-smoking/ The federal government spent millions of dollars in recent years to discourage tobacco use among hipsters through a program that recommends “styling your sweet mustache” and listening to music “no one else has heard of” as good alternatives to smoke breaks. ... ... Ling has concluded that hipsters need something more than scary health warnings to keep them from lighting up. “Saying ‘Smoking is bad for you’ isn’t relevant to them,” she said in a 2010 article on the UCSF Web site. “But they do care about self expression and social justice.”

It would instantly be a national if not world wide tourist attraction. Which can bring about its own difficulties. But I think the pros would outweigh the cons. The question would be the structural upkeep. I don't think this would be any more or less manageable than the upkeep on our state's other floating bridges and could be paid in part by local hotel/tourist taxes. There's an engineering standpoint regarding salt water erosion and tidal movement which isn't that much at point of Puget Sound. Plus the actual engineering of keeping the ships in place and the roadway connecting them. So of course the Navy will want to throw cold water on the whole thing.

This might be as good of time as any to have a repository for interesting photos and news about naval vessels which are retired, about to be scrapped, are museums or are residing in one of the many so-called Ghost Fleets across the world. Living near Bremerton Naval Shipyard, I've had the pleasure since I was a kid of gawking at the pale grey figures of retired US Navy ships anchored in Puget Sound. As for an interesting article, one of our state legislators in Washington state is proposing a study on whether two to three retired aircraft carriers at Bremerton, the USS Independence, The USS Constellation and the USS Kitty Hawk can be tethered together in order to create a floating bridge. At first blush the proposal seems far-fetched. Although it would be an innovative way to quickly create a long floating bridge, a process in my state that can take a decade and cost billions of dollars. Per the article. "I know that people from around the world would come to drive across the deck of an aircraft carrier bridge, number one,” Young said. “Number two, it's the right thing to do from my standpoint because this is giving a testimony and a legacy memorial to our greatest generation." The local NPR station article is here. http://kuow.org/post/puget-sound-lawmaker-pitches-new-bridge-built-old-aircraft-carriers The Washington Post article is here. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/10/a-washington-state-representative-wants-to-build-a-bridge-out-of-retired-aircraft-carriers/

Of course the thing that really pisses me off is Libertarians and their ilk who try to paint Lincoln as a tyrant. I get a bit annoyed when I have to meet some smug Sovereign Citizen type with poor fashion choices who tries to spout off about Lincoln arresting eleventy jillion reporters and legislators.

Sadly. I don't have the time just at the moment to fully opine on this thread, which is a shame since the Civil War has always been more in my wheel house. My main objections are viewing the incident and the causes leading up to it through the prism of modern politics. The second is assigning one-size-fits-all reasons for the war i.e "States Rights" or "Slavery". The conflict was complicated and multifaceted. When you have the brothers of the First Lady fighting on the side of the Rebels and Union Generals and an eventual Vice President coming from the South, things are complicated. Finally I object to the Confederacy being labeled as "Evil" and in the same vein as the Nazis which seems to be a fashionable thing to do these days with modern academics and media types resorting to this gimmick. The Confederacy and the Slavery were wrong. Very much so. We can go on at length about the ills of chattel slavery and the hypocrisy of Victorians and Christians in the South advocating for it. But equating them with Nazis seems more a tactic to discredit ones political opponents today who predominately come from a certain geographic region than honestly distilling the reasons for the war.

Per the article... Ghulam Ahmed Bilour, a member of the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party, was angry at the suggestions that the Pakistan army were mere mercenaries. “My army is not a rent-an-army,” Bilour said. The Pakistani Parliament then broke down into uproarious laughter before ending the session so the members could have enough time to honor kill a rape victim. Pakistani opposition politicians are concerned about further taxing Pakistan’s already strained military. “Forty percent of the army is engaged in the war on terror,” said Hussain. I bet forty percent is engaged in the war on terror...

Yes. You are being a pedant. I was using it as an analogy that was easily recognizable where deer and elk shed antlers which look and feel "bony" and grow them back by the fall. It's occurs yearly. Whereas salmon will undergo a metamorphosis once in their life and an adult "spawned out" sockeye, chum, chinook, pink or coho salmon will look remarkably different than an adult salmon who is still in the salt water. I was using modern analogs to propose a what-if for the Triceratops vs Torosaurus theory which I disagree with by the way. They look to me to be two separate species.

If some sort of shooting war started between Iran and Saudi before 2016, what is the over/under on the number of days, weeks, months that the House of Saud would stand?

That is interesting about the Triceratops versus the Torosaurus. If they were the same species (which to my untrained eye they seem different) I guess it could be like an elk dropping its antlers in the spring. Or the physiological changes salmon undergo during osmoregulation when they leave salt water and enter fresh water.

They keep picking fights with the Israelis! Lack of Protestant Work Ethic. I think that the comparison between Nazi Germany and your Arab stereotype falls apart in that even though the Nazi regime had all the hallmarks mentioned, the individual German soldier bought into what was being sold to them and were willing to fight hard and die by the millions to accomplish that goal. Oh know we like to bash them but the individual Kraut was a damn good soldier. I'm not sure if the individual Arab soldier (as a broad stereotype) buys into the goals that the leaders of their individual nation states are (were since this was 1999) peddling. If you were a Saudi, Iraqi, Egyptian, Syrian, would you want to die for the House of Saud, Saddam Hussein, Anwar Sadat or the Assad regime? I wouldn't. Particularly with the fractured nature of their society with tribal and religious differences which transcend arbitrary national lines and which predate these regimes by hundreds and hundreds of years. Add to the equation the notion independence is still a relatively new concept for the Arab states, since most of them were ruled by the Ottoman Turks since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

I'm not necessarily disputing anything. But we have whales, dolphins and seals whose ancestors left the oceans, grew lungs, said fuck it, and went back into the ocean. This is very much an over simplification. But it seems critters will evolve as many times as they see fit.

Yes. But what is Rock and Roll music? What is Country and Western music? They are both one and the same, leaping from the same well spring of American consciousness, born in the Appalachians from the same Blue Grass parent, tempered with Black jazz and gospel revivals, reared in the juke joints and road houses of nameless American byways and finally nurtured by the same record companies and producers who discovered artists like Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. The first true Rock and Roll song was "Rock Around the Clock" performed by Bill Haley & His Comets who was originally a Texas Swing and Western Yodeler performing in such bands as The Four Aces of Western Swing. So intertwined are the two that an individual term for the genre of music, rockabilly, was coined to describe the combination with singers like Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis representing the style. Perkins would have his songs covered by numerous rock and roll acts including The Beatles. The distinctive sound of Southern Rock is an offshoot of the rockabilly era of the 1950s and early 1960s with well known bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Lynyrd Skynard, .38 Special, The Georgia Satellites and the Doobie Brothers appealing to both Rock and Roll and Country and Western lovers. Lastly, so many rock and country artists have crossed over between the two genres that there is little reason to try to differentiate between the two. As my final examples. Here is Kenny Rogers and the First Edition performing the psychedelic "Just Dropped In". On the flipside, we have former rock and rollers Ricky Nelson's paeon about the reception he received from ungrateful hippies when he sang a country song at a rock and roll reunion concert. The morale of this story? Don't be a hippy. Love Rock and Roll and Country and Western.

When of the best things about Seattle is watching the Blue Angels during (and practicing before) SeaFair.

I'm done with this.

Look. If you're unable or unwilling to factor in the geopolitical and economic realities faced by the British Empire from the 1930s to late 1940s and insist that the decline if the Royal Navy came about because of a faulty battle cruiser design or something about hating Churchill, then there's really no point in going further - although this won't stop Zin from insisting on having the last word. All of the European colonial powers were suffering the same fate post WW1 and certainly post WW2. The difference is that the British came out relatively better than their Continental contemporaries. Or are we really expecting the Brits to continue to accomplish the impossible with a fraction of the resources?

And just for the record, apparently we are to believe it is the British and Royal Navy's fault that Japan broke treaty obligations and became a pariah nation for building a large navy that it couldn't afford or even fuel and which barely managed a foray into the Indian Ocean and with battleships like the Yamato which they didn't even have oil to use.

Awww. Zin is using his favorite word, "strawman" once again. Yeah. It's pretty hard to take you seriously when you are obviously trying to rewrite history because of your personal politics and you are fussy over the fact that American Conservatives really dig Winston Churchill and so are bound and determined to take him down a notch by cobbling together a bunch of cherry-picked anecdotes and shaking together into a crappoast that defies the smell test when you look at it. Letting your personal politics cloud your reporting of personal events is a very shoddy way of telling history. And it makes you no better than Stephen Ambrose or Tom Brokaw. And no, I'm not going to engage you in fanciful alternate history what ifs about the American Navy not being in World War 2 and that would allow the Japanese to beat the Royal Navy because somehow the Japanese would magic up the supply fleets to project power across the world because it's fucking stupid, irrelevant and something we expect better of you. Take the AH what-if scenarios and play that game with Dai over at HAV. We deal in real and hard facts here. The fact remains that throughout the 60-70 year timeline mentioned, the Royal Navy remained the premier naval force in the world. And even in World War 2, they were able to cruise through the Axis lake called the Mediterranean, gain naval supremacy there while guarding its Atlantic convoys, supplying the Soviets through the Arctic and projecting power into the Indian Ocean. Four out of the Five Oceans. That's not bad. It was quite obvious that after being shattered after two World Wars and losing its global empire, the need and ability for Great Britain to maintain the Royal Navy after 1945, 1948 and into the 1950s ceased. You don't need a Royal Navy to guard India and your colonial possessions when you no longer own them or when Dominions are more than willing to look after their own security needs. If you want to look at why the Royal Navy no longer is the force it was during the Age of Nelson, look there. That's the reason. The British could have been building Essex Carriers and Iowas in the 1930s and it still wouldn't change the fact they'd be dead broke and unable to afford those ships by the dawn of the Atomic Age.

Yeah. No offense. I'm calling bullshit on this whole exercise which seems to be solely to felate Zins hate boner for Winston Churchill. Pity that the Royal Navy remained the preeminent Naval force throughout the 60-70 year timeline outlined up until the 1930s at the very and remained a force to be reckoned with into the 1940s to the point that it contributed the majority of the naval vessels in the largest amphibious landing in world history. This is despite being an island nation with a fraction of the population of its competitors and allies and with global commitments that spanned all five oceans. And this is despite being on the forefront of two sanguinary World Wars, twenty years apart, that bled the country dry of men and treasury. So yes, the Royal Navy eventually was overtaken by its Colonial partner over a period of time that saw wooden ships with sails give way to iron clads, steamships, coal, oil and eventually nuclear warships. But the decline owes more to the inevitable decline of the British Empire which saw it fall from being the Workshop of the World to a bombed-out and bankrupt shell which couldn't even afford proper utilities for its people. Saying that the Royal Navy declined because of a few harebrained ship designs here and there or a tactical defeat here and there engages in the same lazy navel gazing (get it, navel...) that has people blaming the M16 for losing Vietnam. This was over a period of time mind you that saw an industrial revolution in metallurgy, ballistics, radio, sonar, radar and aviation all of which the Royal Navy was at or near the forefront. Other than the US, was there any nation that came close? And I dare say, the Royal Navy probably faced greater odds throughout its two wars.

Which is why the Royal Navy was quickly eclipsed by its competitors and was soundly trounced in the fires of World War 1. ... ... Oh wait...

Ballistics wankery is boring, truth be told. Hunting Wehraboos is where the real sport is.

The evidence is clear. 30-30 > 6.8 SPC. As proven by SCIENCE! Time to scrap everything!

I saw someone in Off Topic posted a link to National Review that had a photo montage of the Battle of Okinawa. Sure enough, they included the photo of my great uncle "Bud" Hocking who is the tall and gangly BAR man on the left. http://www.nationalreview.com/slideshows/battle-okinawa#3 And of course the Hocking cheekbones which all of the men in my family have. Sadly, Uncle Bud didn't survive the battle and - according to family lore - was shot by a "sniper" at Shuri Castle. A few months earlier, Bud was detailed as one of the Marines in President Roosevelt's funeral train honor guard since he was so tall and looked handsome in his uniform. And it was all unfair considering the war was already lost to everyone except the madmen running Japan. His mother saw this photo in one of news magazines of the day (I can't remember which one) and it became a family heirloom since it was the last photo of her favorite son which she never really quite got over. He's buried at Washelli Cemetary here in Seattle. We try to visit him on Memorial Day when he have the chance.

LEVERevolution (and some of the other offerings ) versus 6.8 is exactly what I was thinking about. If only for the LOLs of comparing a 120 year old round that was designed originally for black powder versus one of the latest WunderCalibers.

So I guess the next thing to do is compare the 6.8 versus the 30-30 and show the latter (particularly with the modern rounds coming out) running roughshod over the 6.8.