An expatriate Southerner in the Midwest, writing about writing and whatever dadgum else interests him. Author of the science fiction thrillers FROZEN ORBIT, FRONTIER, and ESCAPE ORBIT, published by Baen Books.
To weed out the infidels, according to news reports, the terrorists asked people for the name of Muhammad’s mother or to recite a verse from the Quran.
And that wasn’t even the worst terrorist attack of the weekend.
The Washington Post reported that one British mother and her young children survived when captors who shot her allowed her to leave on the condition she immediately convert to Islam. The siege of the mall, which included the taking of hostages, lasted four days. Three floors of the mall collapsed and bodies were buried in the rubble.
And that wasn’t even the worst terrorist attack of the weekend.
Read the whole thing, but here’s another snippet to keep things in perspective:
We’re talking about Christian persecution by Muslims because of a particularly macabre issue: Jews have already largely been driven out of many Muslim countries.
Lela Gilbert, a journalist who writes about Jewish and Christian persecution, tells of encountering jihadi graffiti in Jerusalem that read “First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday.” She didn’t get the meaning at first. A friend explained that it referred to Jews worshiping on Saturday and Christians on Sunday and, more subtly, about the order that non-Muslims would be targeted.
…at least within my immediate circle of friends. After pitching this to them four years ago, Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine finally ran my article about a rather challenging trip with a Boeing Business Jet (a VIP 737) into a little place in the Himalayas called Paro.
From where I sat, it looked nuts: The crew would immediately have to bank right, pointing the nose at an imposing mountain, then honk it through a 270-degree climbing turn inside a box canyon to come out above the ridge and head back over the runway.
Would they make it in (or out)? More importantly, would I be able to keep my job? Read the whole thing and find out!
She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes, la de da…
UPDATE: Almost lost in the noise of me blowing my own horn, this issue also has a couple of great features on subjects near and dear to my heart.
First up, a look at XCOR’s Lynx spaceplane, which ya’ll may recall is my personal favorite in the tourist-spaceflight sweepstakes.
Finally, a story on the numerous ways engineering nerds (a term of endearment, trust me) saved the day when spacecraft didn’t exactly work as expected.
From across the pond, the UK Daily Mail on plans to turn Houston’s old Ellington Field into a commercial spaceport:
The city announced yesterday that it had applied for a licence to build the United States’ latest and biggest spaceport, and has already drawn up a detailed proposal of what the state-of-the-art facility would look like if it gets the green light.
The spaceport, which would be built on a 450-acre site that is currently home to the US military and NASA operations at Ellington Airport, would include a sleek passenger terminal and an aviation museum.
The white zone is for loading and unloading…
Plus some spiffy pictures from the Houston Airport Authority. Observant readers will note a couple of Boeing Sonic Cruisers mixed in with the SpaceShipTwos and Orbital L1011 launchers. Really observant readers will see an old B727 in the far background, which I assume represents ZeroG’s “vomit comet” franchise. Didn’t see XCOR or Stratolaunch represented, but it’s just concept art so no reason to get in a twist over it. And to be honest, municipal airport authorities tend to be booster-ish: that is, real good at coming up with grandiose plans that never see the light of day…and when they do, they’re often based on shaky economics. Though I did like how they hope to eventually host “international” spaceflights, which I take to mean the kind of point-to-point suborbital concepts of which I’m a bit of a fan.
It’d be nice to see all this come to pass, but there are a lot of other things that need to happen first. Namely, spaceplanes need to start showing up en masse.
The Aircraft Owners’ and Pilots’ Association, which represents small-plane owners and operators across the United States, said it has received dozens of complaints from members “subjected to random searches” by Customs and Border Protection, local police, or both.
“None of the stops resulted in anything being found,” said Steve Hedges, a spokesman for the owners and pilots association.
“In most cases, the pilots were stopped and held while their planes were searched. … I’m told one pilot was asleep in a motel room with his wife when agents kicked the door down and took them back out to the airport to search his plane, only to find nothing there.”
So yeah, it’s pretty clear this cat’s out of the bag; DEA/CPB/TSA/WTF are targeting pretty much anybody flying small aircraft between pot-legal and –illegal states, assuming they’re up to no good. Sorry, but Joe Cessna on an IFR flight plan who happens to stop in Colorado for avgas is not the same as somebody skimming the Gulf of Mexico (i.e. masking radar) in a clapped-out Beech 18 and landing on some grass strip in Florida. We can usually guess what that guy is up to.
I keep repeating it, because they just keep doing it: our government has come off the rails and is operating way beyond its constitutional authority. This has to stop before civil disobedience (and unrest) becomes the only recourse we have.
Figures this crap would start reaching a boil right about the time I find a cheap way to fly:
Back in the Saddle, Sep. 2013
UPDATE: Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association (AOPA) is not taking this quietly. Though given this Administration’s history with FOIA requests, we probably won’t see much without legal action. Fortunately that’s not something AOPA’s shy about.
Remember Buckyballs? They were all the rage until a year or so ago. If you’re wondering what happened to them, read on…though if you have high blood pressure you’re guaranteed to blow an artery over this one:
On July 10, 2012, the Consumer Product Safety Commission instructed Maxfield & Oberton to file a “corrective-action plan” within two weeks or face an administrative suit related to Buckyballs’ alleged safety defects. Around the same time—and before Maxfield & Oberton had a chance to tell its side of the story—the commission sent letters to some of Maxfield & Oberton’s retail partners, including Brookstone, warning of the “severity of the risk of injury and death possibly posed by” Buckyballs and requesting them to “voluntarily stop selling” the product.
It was an underhanded move, as Maxfield & Oberton and its lawyers saw it. “Very, very quickly those 5,000 retailers became zero,” says Mr. Zucker.
“Underhanded” is putting it mildly, although it wasn’t long before they went straight to “vindictive”:
Nonetheless, the commission pressed ahead with its war on Buckyballs. Most infuriating was the commission’s argument that a total recall was justified because Buckyballs have “low utility to consumers” and “are not necessary to consumers.”
And exactly who the hell is authorized to make such a determination? Since when did we hand ourselves over to a Central Economic Politburo? Oh, right…around about 2008:
Maxfield & Oberton resolved to take to the public square. On July 27, just two days after the commission filed suit, the company launched a publicity campaign to rally customers and spotlight the commission’s nanny-state excesses. The campaign’s tagline? “Save Our Balls.”
Online ads pointed out how, under the commission’s reasoning, everything from coconuts (“tasty fruit or deadly sky ballistic?”) to stairways (“are they really worth the risk?”) to hot dogs (“delicious but deadly”) could be banned. Commission staff were challenged to debate Mr. Zucker, and consumers were invited to call Commissioner Inez Tenenbaum’s “psychic hotline” to find out how it was that “the vote to sue our company was presented to the Commissioners on July 23rd, a day before our Corrective Action Plan was to be submitted.”
Running this man’s company out of business wasn’t good enough: despite years of legal precedent to the contrary, Zucker is now being personally sued by Your Benevolent Government. It’s pretty clear this guy has been targeted.
At best, this is the kind of invasive nanny-state nonsense that’s been all the rage in Europe for years. At worst, it’s another sign of our descent into Banana-Republicanism. Neither option has ended well. You can’t just upend the system of laws that undergird your society without eventual catastrophe. What investor in their right mind would commit their time and money to anything in a capricious system, knowing it can suddenly turn against him for no good reason (which is more likely if he hasn’t made the right friends)? From Argentina to Zimbabwe, every country that’s gone down this path has ended up in squalor.
When entire agencies of unaccountable paper-hangers start making things personal, then before too long the citizenry is left to decide between two bad choices: obey or revolt. Given our history, my money’s on the torches and pitchforks though Uncle Sugar’s doing everything possible to tamp down those leanings.
One burning question I have that wasn’t answered in this piece: what is Mr. Zucker’s political affiliation? Because that seems to be a thing with this crowd.
Regardless of your ideological bent, it’s clear that our nation is at an historical crossroads if not an outright impasse. Our federal government has gone off the rails established by the Constitution, and we are powerless to change it. At least, if we’re counting on our elected representatives to do something about it. They’re too invested in the status quo, so why would they want to reform anything?
More importantly, what can we do about it? While tar, feathers, and pitchforks might be emotionally gratifying (if not downright appropriate), there is a better way.
And the best part? It’s already spelled out for us in Article V of the Constitution:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.
So the amendment process originating in Congress as we’re all familiar with has a corollary that until now most of us probably weren’t familiar with: we have the authority to originate Amendments ourselves, beginning at the state level. And if they pass the three-fourths-of-the-states threshold, then guess what? They become part of the Constitution and there isn’t a damned thing the Congresstards can do about it.
If you listen to Mark Levin, then you know where this came from because I’m certainly not smart enough to have figured it out myself. I was incredibly excited about this undertaking when he first started talking about it a few weeks ago, and now that his book’s finally out I’m itching to read it.
The big question is are there enough of us with the will to restore our country to something resembling its founding principles?
As this movement builds momentum, I have no doubt that it will reveal stark differences between ideologies within each party. Honest liberals like Ron Wyden (D-OR) will probably be a lot more receptive to it than the leftist thugs who currently run his party. Likewise, there’s a huge chasm between principled constitutionalists like Ted Cruz (R-TX) and statist tools like John McCain (R-Crazytown).
There’s an enormous difference between garden-variety liberals who think the rich should pay more or that gay marriage is no different than desegregation, and leftists who embrace those ideas in the service of marshaling forces towards something far more radical. If you don’t believe me, then believe Saul Alinsky. The slimy sonofabitch knew exactly what he was doing and entire institutions have sprung up to train up activists in his methods. The “New School” and Midwest Academy are two leading examples, and our President is a disciple. That’s not made up, and it’s not a fevered tin-foil-hat fantasy. He’s a radical as is most of the current Democrat leadership.
The Alinskyites knew that collectivism could only be imposed on America from the inside-out; no Red Dawns or Worker’s Revolts here. So he set about figuring out how commie radicals should infiltrate establishment institutions until they reached the point where they held the power and could use it to impose their will. That is, turning our nation into something that our founders (hell, even our grandparents) wouldn’t recognize: a socialist “utopia.” In a country where states cannot tame the federal beast, citizens quickly become subjects to the whim of a credentialed elite who frankly couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a map.
In other words, Socialism is just Communism with better manners.
Yet it all ends up the same way: in ruins. The EU is falling apart, having run head-first into Thatcher’s axiom about socialist states eventually running out of other people’s money. Even the homogeneous cultures of Norway and Sweden are beginning to rethink their commitments to an overly-generous welfare state. I expect they’ll resolve it in a more civil manner than the Club Med basket-case countries, but one shouldn’t hope for too much.
And while we can mourn the distant memories of principled Democrats like Sam Nunn, Pat Moynihan, and Scoop Jackson, the really sad truth is we have no effective oppostion whatsoever. The Republicans are only marginally better than the Dems in that they’re not actively trying to subvert the country. But the party leadership is made up of corporatists, which is the end state of politicians who are pro-business but too clueless to recognize when they’re being played.
If you don’t really appreciate the difference between Big Business and Free Markets, it’s not too long before you’re supporting all kinds of lefty nonsense while shirking your constitutional duties and crapping all over the people who make up your core voting bloc. You end up standing for nothing but your own re-election because you’ve never quite internalized the fundamental principles of free people and free markets in a free country.
Eat it, commies. WE THE PEOPLE still hold the power, and it’s high time we started using it.
…Nature’s way of asking, “How’s that space program coming along?”
I reckon the answer to that particular question depends on where you’re looking.
Turns out that last winter’s big explode-y meteor over Russia may have come from a whole pack of big explode-y meteors. Which means we could stand a good chance of running into some of his buddies one day.
If that doesn’t bother you enough, there’s always this handy little graphic of all the potentially civilization-ending rocks lurking out there:
Haven’t done this in a while, but this is my last week on Kindle Select before I put it back up on Barnes&Noble, iTunes and Kobo.
It’s been a long time since I tried goosing sales like this as KDP Free days don’t have the Oomph they used to, unless it pushes you into the Top 100. So yeah, let’s do that.
The sequel is very close to being done, or at least it’s past the “vomit draft” stage and is turning into something coherent and readable. If you haven’t read Perigee yet, this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. If you know people who might like it, then bring ’em to the party.
On July 10, 2012, the Consumer Product Safety Commission instructed Maxfield & Oberton to file a “corrective-action plan” within two weeks or face an administrative suit related to Buckyballs’ alleged safety defects. Around the same time—and before Maxfield & Oberton had a chance to tell its side of the story—the commission sent letters to some of Maxfield & Oberton’s retail partners, including Brookstone, warning of the “severity of the risk of injury and death possibly posed by” Buckyballs and requesting them to “voluntarily stop selling” the product.
The Chiles Files 