Category: Current Events

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Zero Dork Thirty

In which a gullible civilian reporter gets rolled by the Bin Laden “shooter”.

Last month, Esquire magazine published a long story about the post-SEAL life of the trigger man of the Bin Laden raid. The guy has not had it easy by this account, and now I’m very glad I didn’t rush to link to it when it first came out last month.

And boy, it was tempting. But something just didn’t ring true, not to mention that it’s hard to get too broken up about someone voluntarily giving up their benefits by checking out early. Sixteen years is a serious commitment to a very dangerous job that very few people can do. It’s certainly long enough to understand the ramifications of mustering out just four years shy of retirement. Really, dude?

I just had a really hard time getting my head around that story. Not having been Special Ops, their psyche is beyond my comprehension in just about every way imaginable. Perhaps being a SEAL was so important to him that finishing out his 20 in a different field was out of the question.

Yeah, yeah: everyone’s different. You can’t (and shouldn’t) pass judgment. But as I said, something just didn’t sound right. And sure enough, something wasn’t. SOFREP has done their own background work and describes how this writer got played:

Esquire Is Screwed: Duped by Fake UBL Shooter

One story coming out of Joint Special Operations Command is that the Esquire “shooter” isn’t the shooter after all. To be clear, he wasn’t the point man that put the well placed rounds into UBL’s head that ended the terrorist leaders life. Sure he was there, and deserves credit but he wasn’t the man who shot UBL, and ended his life. And this is an important fact that must be clarified.

The actual shooter at Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSW DEVGRU or SEAL TEAM 6) has continued to maintain his professional integrity and has not come forward with the story, and most likely never will. Looks like Esquire and Bronstein are the ones who are really screwed, not their interviewee; our sources say he’s off cashing large checks from unsuspecting donors who bought the Esquire pity piece.

Lots more at the link. Between the two dueling accounts, it’s quite a story…so who to believe? Everyone has their own agenda, but my money’s on the former Operators at SOFREP and their professional connections.
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Space Nerd News

Been a while since I’ve updated the blog (I’m largely staying away from the internet ’cause it keeps getting in the way of actually, you know, writing), but as promised here’s some links to interesting stuff:

Christian Science Monitor explores the pychological aspects of the Inspiration Mars effort. Short version: “Survivor” in space. Though I can think of a lot of “reality” TV stars that ought to be sent on a possible one-way mission to deep space. Like pretty much all of them. Buh-bye, media whores…

So how would they get there, anyway? Popular Mechanics has a nice overview of where things stand with commercial spaceflight: The Race to Cash in on Earth Orbit

And in not-unrelated news: Number of “City Killer” Asteroids “Very Large”, House Panel Told. As Professor Reynolds often quotes, “Asteroids are nature’s way of asking, ‘How’s that space program coming along?'”

UPDATE: Almost forgot, the brains behind Inspiration Mars have posted a response to Dennis Wingo’s analysis of their plan. Unfortunately it’s about what I expected: everybody loves the idea of a Venus-Mars flyby, but they’d have to be prepared to leave a good year ahead of the current schedule, which is ambitious enough already. An awful lot of tech currently in development would have to go just right for that to happen, and it sounds like they don’t want to bank on it.

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Good Riddance

Totalitarian Socialist Hugo Chavez has assumed room temperature. Maybe, just maybe, Venezuela now has a chance at actual prosperity. Wish I could get my hopes up, as any prosperous nation in our hemisphere is a good thing for everyone, but the history of that region doesn’t bear much faith in a good outcome.

I hadn’t planned on devoting any time to this until stumbling into a tweet that absolutely infuriated me. Behold the staggering idiocy of an actual U.S. Representative. Once more, the mask slips. It’ll be instructive to see how many more Lefties fully out themselves in the next few days in their fervor to mourn a man whom the world is better off without.

Commies stink. Especially when they hold elected office.

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Sequester Track

Since flight delays are one of the most over-hyped metrics of Sequestrageddon (no doubt to be followed next year by Sequestrageddon II: This Time, it’s Personal), let’s use a little modern technology to follow the decline of American civilization in real time:

Remember, flight delays have already started. Trust us. And ignore that man behind the curtain!

Wow. Just look at the path of fiscal destruction wrought upon our national airspace system! One cringes in horror. It must be falling into chaos ’cause DHS says so. And their fingers are on the collective pulse of the nation…right?

Ahem…

U.S. airports, including Los Angeles International and O’Hare International in Chicago, are already experiencing delays in waiting lines as a result of automatic federal spending cuts, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Monday.

Their fingers are probing a collective something, alright, but it ain’t our pulse.

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Vacation Plans

If anyone (and their significant other) is looking for a once-in-a-lifetime trip in a few years, then bazillionaire Dennis Tito has just the deal for you:

The Crazy Plan to Fly Two Humans to Mars

“Crazy” is PopMech’s choice of words, not mine. This seems eminently doable, though not without significant risk. We know how to make rockets work. We know how to make manned spacecraft work. We even know how to make inflatable spacecraft work (just ask Bigelow Aerospace). What we don’t know is how to keep all of it working for nearly a year and a half with no chance for shipping spare parts. No doubt they’ll bring spare parts for the stuff they figure won’t last, but if something critical goes hard down they could be really screwed.

Even though it’s a simple flyby, that’s how big things get started. Prove the concept, find what works, fix what doesn’t. If Inspiration Mars pulls this off, “historic” might not be big enough of a word.

But enough of my bloviating. You’re better off reading from people who really know what they’re talking about.

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Neighborhood Watch

Last night I had cobbled together a lot of interesting stuff about today’s cosmic near-miss with asteroid 2012 DA14 (a pretty innocuous – even boring – name for something that had the potential to do so much damage). I know the professional astronomers have to catalog this stuff in ways that make sense to them, but something passing inside the orbits of our own weather satellites that’s big enough to flatten a large city should have a more impressive calling card. Like Zul the Destroyer. Or Hoss.

So yes, there was already a good deal of material ready to go but things just got a lot more interesting overnight: Hundreds Injured in Russian Meteorite Event.

Just passin’ through…

Continue reading “Neighborhood Watch”

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And So It Begins

Don’t you feel safer already?

I encourage everyone, regardless of your political leanings, to read this and draw your own conclusions.

As multiple vehicles close off the street and announce over a loudspeaker for all your neighbors to remain indoors (and are prohibited from leaving), the lead agent calls your house and directs your wife to come out of the house – and sit in the front seat. She does. Then the Homeland Security Special Tactical Unit, and the county sheriff Swat Team arrive, and drive two armored cars over the curb onto the lawn, as the “Jack Booted Thugs” with machine guns, helmets, boots, camo, etc. enter and search your house.

You see a Homeland Security Helocopter (sic) circling overhead. You are asked if you have any explosives (well, several cans of black powder….) and are there any booby traps in the house. They offer to let you read the search warrant, but your hands are cuffed behind your back. The agent in your car reads it very quickly.

…

You examine your house. Your computers are gone along with every extra & old hard drive, all data cds, floppies, thumb drives, compact flash drives, and other SD drives for your camera. But most shocking, is that your entire gun collection, which you spent a lifetime building, is gone.

Antique guns, airguns, non-guns. Virtually everything. One antique shotgun lies broken on the floor. Papers are strewn everywhere. Once they looked at it, and didn’t want it, they just tossed it aside. Piles of paper. The house is trashed – every room. Your clothing has been ransacked. Your wife’s clothing and underwear. You don’t even know what is missing. You look around, feel sick, lock up the house and go to the motel.

This tale comes from a very popular pro-firearms website that does *not* drink the NRA kool-aid or worship at Ted Nugent’s feet. It is possible to be a Bill of Rights (and thus 2nd Amendment) absolutist without being a libertarian crank (though I admit it helps).

While we should always be wary of relying on one side of the story, that’s the only side we’re getting for now. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

 

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End of the World Update, Part Infinity

In case you’re not feeling gloomy enough, then check out these two not-entirely-unrelated stories from Zero Hedge:

Argentina orders a two-month supermarket price freeze. Because the velocity of money always responds to government dictates.

The Argentinians who suffered through the Peron collapse – at least the ones who understand the how & why of it – are preparing for the inevitable:

What consumers will certainly do is scramble into local stores to take advantage of artificially-controlled prices knowing very well they have two short months to stock up on perishable goods at today’s prices, before the country’s inflation comes soaring back, only this time many of the local stores will not be around as their profit margins implode and as owners, especially of foreign-based chains, make the prudent decision to get out of Dodge while the getting’s good and before the next steps, including such measures as nationalization, in the escalation into a full out hyperinflationary collapse…

Meanwhile, back here in the good old USA, if this guy’s right then get ready for a wild ride in the stock market:

I have written before about the grotesque – in my view – and persistent misallocation of capital (in financial markets) being caused by the mispricing of capital/money by central banks; by their ongoing “promises? to misbehave – seemingly forever – such that anyone with good common sense will eventually be battered and beaten into submission and be forced into the misallocation game; and by the – again, in my view – irresponsible behaviour of fiscal policymakers too. Collectively, we have a huge global game of kicking the can down the road driven by excessive and wasteful government largesse, funded by explosive growth in central bank balance sheets.

Put simply, the Fed’s Everlasting Gobstopper money-printing operation is pretty much the only thing propping up equities. They’re flooding the world with cheap money, creating an investment bubble that will eventually pop just like the housing bubble.

Lord help us but the Commie thug Khrushchev may have been right after all: Capitalists would sell us the rope we’d hang ourselves with.

I say that as a proud gun-totin’ free-marketeer, but would note that there is a distinction between a free market and whatever it is we’ve been experiencing for the past several years.

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Creeping Tyranny Update

Nope, I’m not talking about the Prezzy’s gun-control confab yesterday. It was mostly unsurprising and in the end will probably have zero effect for good or ill. Except for the recent panic buying of guns, ammo, bb’s, rocks, and pointy sticks, nothing’s changed my plans to update our family arms locker in the next month or so. We’ll leave it at that.

This, however, is frightening: a 70-year old man held over 24 hours before actually being charged with…doing absolutely nothing against the law. He eventually had to agree to not sue the life out of the sheriff’s department in exchange for their dropping the charges. So does anyone still think “it can’t happen here”? Well it can, and it is, a little bit at a time: the proverbial “death by a thousand cuts” (or “being pecked to death by a chicken”, a cliché I normally use to describe raising children).

Local police have zero authority to order a pilot to land –  it’s not like pulling over a car on the highway, which should be patently obvious. But these days lots of things that should be obvious aren’t. Here’s AOPA Pilot magazine on the same subject:

A better knowledge of aviation issues among law enforcement officials may have produced a better result for Fleming. Griffin said she had to tell the officers on the scene to clear out the runway, and one officer talked about commandeering the airport. “He was running around, the one guy that was commandeering everything, saying, ‘We were going to shoot him down,’” she said.

“A better knowledge of aviation issues may have produced a better result.” Gee, ya think? Oh, wait, they had it…

On the other hand, Griffin said that pilots from the Chesterfield County Sheriff flew the department’s helicopter to the airport, but left when they found out what was going on. “They pulled out a chart and they said, ‘Look here, … nothing in this chart says you cannot fly over the nuclear plant,’” she said. “’Nothing.’”

Emphasis mine.

Sounds like the local gendarmes already had some expert advice within their own ranks. They just chose to ignore it. And if their brothers in uniform couldn’t talk sense into them, then who could? Listen up, po-po’s: You don’t have the authority to order a pilot to land and you sure as hell don’t have the authority to shoot down an aircraft.

I’m not a glider pilot – though it’s looking more and more attractive as an economical way to keep up my stick-and-rudder skills, ’cause flying powered aircraft has been prohibitively expensive for a long time. It could well be that this guy made a couple of judgment errors and needed to get some air under his butt quickly (looking up the glide ratio for this bird, it’s roughly 60:1 which would be 10 miles for every 1,000 feet of altitude). The heat rising from the cooling towers over a nuke plant would be a dandy way to make it back to home plate. Heck, he’s helping pay for it so why not? It’s not like it’s a prohibited area or something – because IT’S NOT.

Over-eager private security is no surprise. That the local deputies would go full Barney Fife and have a total freakout is the part that sticks in my craw. The cops assume tremendous risks every day on our behalf – but they also have tremendous power over our individual liberties. With that comes tremendous responsibility. And the more I hear about police acting irresponsibly (think no-knock SWAT raids at the wrong address or detaining people simply for photographing cops on duty), the more wary and impatient I become.

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Dogs and Cats Living Together

Mass hysteria!

OK, not really. Via Instapundit, a fascinating account of a meeting between Tea Party and MoveOn bigwigs which illustrates there is still some room for agreement between left and right. Ask yourself:

How many of you voted for trillion-dollar deficits?   I haven’t yet met the voter who did, yet representatives on both sides of the aisle continue to impose them on us.

How many of you think we have the premier education system in the world, where the dollars and are efforts are focused on our kids?  Hmmm…none of you?  Then why are so many of our politicians on both sides of the aisle wedded to the status quo, and we see so little change?

How many of you think that our criminal justice system is the best in the world, and the War on Drugs has been a tremendous success?  Hmmm…anyone…left or right?  No?  Then why are so many of our incumbent representatives on both sides of the aisle so weak when it comes to making any real criminal justice reforms?

How many of you think that we have far too much unproductive, government mandated paperwork?  Everyone?  Then why can’t we get our elected representatives at all levels to do something about this?

Yes.

We are increasingly being lorded over by slick-talking charlatans with their own agendas, who care nothing for the people they are about to bury under a fetid, steaming pile of onerous regulations and insurmountable debt. But they’ll be taken care of, so it’s all good in their eyes. As Professor Reynolds says, we now have perhaps the worst class of political leaders in our country’s history (and who benefit from a press that shows no understanding, objectivity, or basic curiosity).

The above questions have answers which don’t have to involve people screaming at each other. Don’t allow yourselves to be taken in by the clown show and their endless parade of shiny things.

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