President Obama responds to Quitter Palin’s high-pitched word salad criticism of his nuclear policy:
I really have no response to that. Last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on…nuclear issues.
SMACK! BANG! ZOOM!
Interesting pause after saying the Quitter wasn’t much of an expert on…what? Politics? Parenting? The English language? The human condition? Anything? Come on, give!
The view from the top of Steptoe Butte, Washington
Photo by Zooey
Good morning, all! I think I’ll go take some pictures after my exam this morning. What are you all doing today?
This is your daily open thread, and if you’ve ever been here before, you know what to do. Just make sure you have fun doing it!
Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski died in a plane crash close to the Russian town Smolensk this morning.All passengers on board were killed. Among them the Governor of Poland’s Central Bank, leading politicians and several leading historians.
That’s what 260 of the Carlsberg Brewery staff think.
The strike in Denmark followed the company’s April 1 decision to introduce new rules for employees on beer drinking at work, said Jens Bekke, spokesman at the world no.4 brewer.
“There has been free beer, water and soft drinks everywhere,” he said. “Yesterday, beers were removed from all refrigerators. The only place you can get a beer in future is in the canteen, at lunch.”
Bekke said drivers retained an old right to three beers per day outside lunch hours, and warehouse workers claimed the same right.
Source: Reuters
Being a Bavarian I sympathize with the guys. Beer to us is not a beverage really, it’s an important source of nutrition. And in America? Here’s Beer Wars:
picture source
While waiting for Music Night, you might as well train your math a bit. Here we go:
At McDonalds you can order Chicken McNuggets in boxes of 6, 9, and 20. What is the largest number such that you can not order any combination of the above to achieve exactly the number you want?
The solution is coming tomorrow, but I’m sure you’ll manage without any help.
Update: Music Night is on, but maybe you’ll try this anyway.
Gerard Way, lead singer of My Chemical Romance. Not much more to be said about the band, other than ROCK AND ROLL! I love these guys. (more below the jump)
Malcolm McLaren died in his home in Switzerland after losing his battle with cancer.
“Rock and roll doesn’t necessarily mean a band. It doesn’t mean a singer, and it doesn’t mean a lyric, really. It’s that question of trying to be immortal.”
~Malcolm McLaren
…and kicks Tom Coburn’s stupid ass in the process.
Look at Rachel Maddow. She comes at me on the basis of emotion. She demonizes me. I don’t want conservatives to win on the basis of emotion. If we lower ourselves to the level they operate on, we hurt ourselves and our arguments.
*sniff*
Here’s the promised more indepth report on Tom Coburn’s utter and despicable hypocrisy:
This is our daily open thread. If you’ve got something on your mind, let’s hear it! If you don’t, well, think of something.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
– Platon
The Itawamba County School District in Mississippi taught a teenage girl a lesson for life recently: intolerance rules.
She wanted to go to her prom with another girl. Since the District couldn’t prevent that, as a governmental entity, without running afoul of the 14th Amendment, it chose to ban the prom alltogether, and hand it over to a private group of parents who could legally discriminate.
And discriminate they did. Constance McMillion received her prom invitation, all right. So did six other students. And it was a special invitation, to a special prom, just for them. The rest of the school attended their prom in a different, undisclosed location.
As if that wasn’t enough to humiliate her, a facebook page has sprung up where annonymous posters can spout their venom against the girl who dared to be herself.
Her reaction? “I just want the negativity to stop because I try to be respectful and positive.”
Too bad the grown-ups didn’t feel the same way.
A year ago President Obama committed himself to seek a world without nuclear weapons:
Today we’re one step further and a new START weapons agreement has been signed in Prague.
The treaty the President plans to sign is one important step forward. It will require the United States and Russia to reduce — by 30 percent below the levels in a treaty signed in 2002 — the number of nuclear warheads they have deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based ballistic missiles, and bombers. It also provides various mechanisms to allow each side to monitor compliance with the treaty by the other country, including on-site inspections and exchanges of data about our respective nuclear arsenals. This kind of transparency promotes strategic stability between the two largest nuclear powers in the world. (source: whitehouse.gov)
What’s more, the nuclear strategy for the US has been changed these days as well. First Strikes are mostly out. You bet that as a European and probable battlefield inhabitant I feel better now. Not altogether safe, but a bit safer.
The society formed to control takeoffs and landings as well as life on a US Navy carrier (multi-page link) is more complex than many cities. The Carrier has been part of naval history as far back as the early 19th century. In those days, kites and balloons were launched as observation platforms.
USS George Washington
I have a personal experience on the process involved in the landing system as my dear old Dad worked for Bendix Radio and was involved in the development of carrier approach systems in the late 1940′s. He was sent to the USS Coral Sea in order to interview Naval pilots and to observe operations. He learned that the average Naval pilot would have nothing to do with an automatic landing system that did not have a manual over-ride. While on the carrier, he developed a system that used a sideband on the plane’s radio that used frequency to indicate vertical attitude and tempo to indicate a deviation from horizontal attitude. It also relied on the pilot’s eyes to determine the direction of horizontal deviation. He left the ship with a working system installed that was compatible with any aircraft and only required minor modifications to the carrier’s radar and communication systems. What helped was that he was chief engineer in the development of the carrier’s electronic systems. Bendix got ten million from the development contract and two million for each of about nine conversions, not bad for about three weeks work. Pop was an early proponent of the KISS principle.
Four months later, he was working for Chance Vought on the F8U (Crusader) and Regulus programs as a lead avionics engineer. Chance Vought had lost the bidding with an entry price of about 100 million for just development of the approach system.
The link, above, provides many chapters in carrier operations, but you may want to look here for some nitty-gritty details on flight deck operations.
This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on this or any other topic.
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
Who said it? Take the Palin or Bachmann quiz.
The Norden bomb-sight was invented by a Dutch immigrant to the US in the 1930”s. While surrounded by a mystique of secrecy in WW II, Luftwaffe spies had actually lifted its secrets prior to the start of he war.
While developed to allow allow coastal patrols to hit enemy ships with a 100 foot target radius from an altitude of 10,000 feet the device fell short of its goals. For this reason, bombing runs consisted of racks of explosive devices intended to bracket the target. Over land, the target radius was supposed to be 1000 feet from an altitude of 20-30,000 feet. It was more like a half mile.
Paul Jamiol
, Jamiol’s World : : : : : : : : : :
From Raw Replay:
Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan that US forces may have violated rules of engagement with the 2007 shooting of two Reuters employees in Baghdad.
I watched this video yesterday on Huffington Post in its entirety. It was very upsetting. The video was obtained by WikiLeaks.
From Huffington Post:
Calling it a case of “collateral murder,” the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.
In the Ratigan interview with the gentleman from WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, he (Assange) says there is another similar video (a military whistleblower video) from Afghanistan – from May of last year where 97 people were bombed – that is going to be released through Wikileaks as soon as they “have finished their analysis”.
