winsor

but i'm sure you're a strong believer that the US had to free the iraqi folks from dictatorship... Bad guess, Sparky. Frankly, I figured that Saddam Hussein was a political godsend. The idea that he was the benefactor of his political rivals to our detriment is ludicrous. When his Secret Police came across anyone on our list of bad people, they typically disappeared for being a greater threat to him than to us. Suspicion of Weapons of Mass Destruction as a Casus Belli? If that had the slightest hint of legitimacy, we would be attacking North Korea, North Dakota, South Africa, South Carolina, Israel, France, Great Britain, Russia, China, India and Pakistan. These are places we KNOW have WMDs. Also, given our Holy Quest to overthrow the Bad Man, A) Quite who is supposed to pay for it? and B) Who is supposed to replace him in that charming locale that is not an order of magnitude worse? I learned to quit asking "who could be worse than this turkey?," since we tend to answer that question by electing them. Just because I think that one politician is an idiot, or that a political party is a bastion of morons does not mean that I am any greater a fan of the politician or party in opposition. As a rule, they are equally contemptible; stupidity knows no political persuasion. Politics largely consists of various people trying do outdo each other - successfully - in the extent to which they are imbiciles. Blue skies, Winsor

Since Islam and Communism are two of my very least favorite religions, I can see no reason to champion either side. Hopefully, if they are at each other's throats they will be more likely to leave us alone - though it never seems to work out that way. Sticking our nose into it is probably the worst thing we can do. Blue skies, Winsor

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/141736/the_ugly_racism_of_the_right_will_be_their_undoing/ Racism is racism. Jesse Jackson, David Duke and Al Sharpton are cut from the same cloth - with the exception that Jesse and Al make their living solely from racism. People of all persuasions get locked up for losing their tempers at police. It's nothing personal, it's just the way it works. It does not matter whether the person is screaming "this is all about the color of my skin!" or "I paid way too much for this muffler!;" if they do not pipe down when so instructed, they may get the opportunity to calm down in the Cooler. It happens across the racial and political spectrum all the time, but it is more newsworthy in some cases than others. The health care system may have problems, but the "progressive reform" suggested by various attorneys holding elective office is hardly the solution. It is about as bright as addressing the problem of people driving into trees by requiring all trees to be capable of impact by cars without injury to the occupants. Just because the Religious Right may be consummate assholes does not mean that the Glassy Eyed Left is not comprised of assholes of equal stupidity. The enemy of my enemy, far from being my friend, is more often than not every bit as bad, if not worse (z.B., Moscow was hardly an improvement over Berlin ca. 1939). I do not so much object to "the Left" or "the Right" as I do to quintessentially ignorant people making binding decisions. Unfortunately, anyone with a clue is culled from the electoral process by the Primaries. It is said that a people get the government they deserve. If so, we must be overwhelmingly mediocre. Blue skies, Winsor

My first reaction to this post is that it is of the "Nippleboy" flamebait ilk. Then I think of the people I have helped put on a backboard prior to the helicopter ride, and it seems that it may be serious. Having survived a near-death experience under a spinning elliptical, I will state categorically that you are living on luck if you are jumping a Stiletto and asking these questions in earnest. The adage about the Lord looking after drunks, fools and small children is all well and good, but works something less than 100% of the time. Don't bank on it. As a first-generation elliptical, the Stiletto is singularly unforgiving of inappropriate control input. An avoidance turn on short final will result in the canopy hitting the ground before the jumper. Badly executed emergency procedures are likely to be fatal as well. I have a bunch of hot canopies around, as well as some very low performance stuff. There are times when a canopy loaded over 2:1 is the hot tip, and other times where much over 1:1 is a very bad idea. The people I know who fly tiny crossbraced canopies brilliantly can also hit the disk every time with a huge accuracy canopy - and know when to pick one over the other. Like some people who know zip about photography but have to have the most impressive camera out there, or the person who can't parallel park but has to have the car that Road and Track was drooling over, you have people who pick their parachute gear on the basis of how cool it sounds or looks. The problem is that the learning curve on the parachute system is not always surviveable. There is a lot to be said for having a canopy whose limits you can explore without dying. Doing a snap turn with a Stiletto at 200 feet might occur in your last couple of minutes of life; this is not quite as likely under a Pilot (though spinning it up is still possible). The only way to know where the line is is to cross it, and you need to be able to survive long enough to get back. All things being considered, you should get some input from someone who has survived the sport for a while, and has a broad range of experience. A thousand jumps is not the same as a hundred jumps ten times. Best of luck - you'll need it. Blue skies, Winsor

+1 +1 Of course, had we not wasted so much on war, we'd have more money. But still nowhere enough. Bush may have some saving graces, but thinking is not one of them. Unfortunately, Obama's genius lies not in Finance, but in getting elected. Neither of them have the faintest idea of how to get us out of this financial catastrophe or, failing that, to limit the damage. You see people pointing fingers back and forth, trying to identify the "culprit." Obama will ruin us! Bush started a war that is both unwinnable and unaffordable! Clinton gave away the ranch to the Chinese! Reagan was numerically illiterate! Johnson took us off the gold standard and Nixon sealed the deal to give us fiat currency! In this case, blamestorming does no good. This economic disaster has been four decades in the making (ten if you go back to the formation of the Federal Reserve), and no one individual or agency alone could have screwed things up this badly. You don't like Obama? Fine, be glad he was elected and will preside over the worst economic collapse the world has ever seen. Not to worry, there is precisely zero chance that McCain (or anyone else that was running) could have done much about it, either. What is a trillion, you ask? Here's an easy way to get a handle on it - figure 100 million people who actually pay real taxes, and a trillion amounts to $10,000 for each and every one of us. Thus, the 11 trillion the government has spend on our behalf amounts to $110,000 that each and every one of us owe (with nothing to show for it) above and beyond mortgages, car loans, credit cards and what have you. IIRC, the foreign debt is something like 14 trillion. Since this is not tax based, you can figure $40,000 of debt for every infant, geezer, wino, welfare queen, CEO and mechanic in this fair land. Throw one more thing into the equation and things get interesting. We burn something like 20 million barrels of oil a day in this country. We produce around 5 million barrels a day. When (not if) the people who are supplying the 15 million barrels a day we need to achieve stasis ask for something other than the government-printed IOUs we call money to pay for it, we're screwed. Not just a little screwed, we're royally screwed. The US of A is now a net importer of food. The food we do produce is heavily dependent on oil for its generation, transportation and processing. If overnight we can only operate 1/4 of our fishing fleet, tractors and combines, have 1/4 as much petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers and have 1/4 of the capacity to truck it to your store, we are going to go on a nationwide diet. Think Somalia with 300,000,000 people. In any event, if you think any one person can provide "change we can believe in" that will avert the consequences of 40 years of dedicated economic mismanagement on an unprecedented scale, I have news for you - that is not physically possible. Arguing about whether Republicans are better than Democrats or vice versa is like trying to say arsenic is better than cyanide. There may be superficial differences between the two, but at the end of the day the results are the same. We are in the death throes of the way of life we had grown to enjoy. Have fun while it lasts - such as it does. Blue skies, Winsor

I suggest you add "metaphor" to "hypocrisy" and "straw-man" as words to look up when you get a dictionary. I suggest you add "proof" to yours....you know, that stuff you can never provide? The request for "proof" is valid for liquor or in math class, period. What constitutes "proof" in a court of law is typically dependent on a wide range of fallacies, and is thus logically meaningless. If one of my students wanted proof of something, I might well assign it to them as an exercise. Badgering Dr. Kallend on an issue on which he does not report to you is annoying. I am sure he and I do not agree on everything line and verse, but I like him and respect his opinion. I find your disrespect irritating, and do not see how it supports your position. Blue skies, Winsor

Source: http://cbs2chicago.com/local/police.deadly.force.2.1105766.html Is the risk to the innocent public from police gunfire, and the risk of mistakes, worth the effort to stop fleeing felons? One of the problems here is that there are a pretty broad range of felonies that do not pose much of an immediate threat to the public. In some States (the Commonwealths of Massachusetts and Virginia come to mind) activities between a man and wife that meet the full approval of Dr. Ruth are major felonies. Oral sex was still on the books as a hanging offense when I lived in Virginia. Another problem is that the level of marksmanship exhibited by the average law enforcement type is execrable. There are numerous cases of LEOs using up two or three high-capacity magazines in an engagement without achieving a single hit. Having people blasting the landscape in the attempt to stop someone who put their controlled-substance prescription medication into daily dose containers (a Federal felony) does not strike me as one of the three best ideas anyone has authored of late. Since my secretary was killed by an individual who was evading high-speed pursuit (he was doing ~100 mph when he rear-ended her stopped car), I have been impressed by how the cure can be worse than the disease. The guy was being sought for consensual activity with a partner who was not quite of age; though I may not approve of his choice of partners, I don't think that nabbing him was worth the life of a nice lady and making a couple of good kids motherless. Since I might be on the road when someone reported to have torn the label off a mattress is nearby, I am concerned both by unaimed high-speed lead flying around and by the high speed automobile that is now out of control if the driver does manage to get hit. In any event, a police policy does not change laws regarding liability, and anyone hit by someone who did not take care to ensure the bullet's destination has a pretty good case for negligence. The fact that it is policy makes the whole department liable, not just Barney Fife. Blue skies, Winsor

Those who oppose Obama had best pick their battles carefully. Chasing will o' the wisps like the birthplace of our chief executive is more likely to do damage to the Republican party than it is to uncover anything tangible that is a threat to the president. When Dan Rather got suckered into publishing a faked letter that complained about GWB going AWOL from the Guard, it worked brilliantly. People lost sight of the fact that the letter, though fake, was factually accurate. By persevorating about whether BHO was born on US of A territory or not, an awful lot of energy is spent over something that is sure to come to naught. While the whacko right is tilting at windmills, the whacko left has free reign. Some people just love conspiracies, and see them everywhere. I subscribe to the principle that one should not attribute to conspiracy that which can be easily explained by incompetence. Again, if someone is actually opposed to BHO, blowing a lot of time and effort making a lot of fuss about his birthplace is to his benefit and to the detriment of his opposition. Blue skies, Winsor

"You fucked up. You trusted us." Otter, in Animal House

Fixed Do you have experience or knowledge on a treatment facility/program without a spiritual component? Yeah. It's called jail.

Or, stuff that never happened but the 'observer' reported it anyway ... and some people are gullable enough to believe it. ... There's one born every minute There's a sucker born again every minute.

He's not black, he's a mulatto. Under apartheid, he qualifies as "colored" at best. Oddly enough, with a Kenyan father and a US mother, he is a prototypical African/American. He is not, however, a negro. Blue skies, Winsor

Look, it's really obvious that things are much too complex to have simply happened by themselves. Thus, it is clear that everything we percieve is the result of something else, which is orders of magnitude more complex and simply happend by itself. How could one dispute somethinig so obvious? Blue skies, Winsor

The obvious answer? Because they can think for themselves. Rocky: "You said you could think!" Bullwinkle: "I didn't say I could think well!"

He has yet to prove that he was not the product of Caesarian section. Since that was not a common procedure when the Constitution was written, the framers did not know who they were disqualifying by insisting on "natural born" citizens.

And people jumping out of good airplanes should be put into asylums... More like if you can't figure out how to open your reserve by yourself, you should jump tandem.

It would be a cold day in hell when I bought a new care in any case, so their fiscal situation does not interest me much. I had a variety of Opels and Vauxhalls that were just great, and would be happy to have one. I was able to do a solid 220 km/h on the Autobahn, and the mileage was still better than a Hummer at 88 km/h. As far as the junk they build in the US of A, you can have it. Automatic transmissions should be outlawed, and people who can't drive a standard should take public transportation. Blue skies, Winsor

Here we get to the crux of the issue: relative importance. Let us grant that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that its presence is a factor on the overall energy balance of the ecosystem. Anyone who made it through Undergraduate Heat Transfer (NOT Thermodynamics, which is a misnomer - it should well be called Thermostatics) to the extent that Radiation was covered should be able to get the basics. Now let us look at the relative importance of the addition of CO2. For one thing, the potential damage is half done already. Even if everyone began quit using fossil fuels today, half of the petroleum variants have already been consumed (make that the easy to obtain half), as well as a similar amount of the high-quality coal and natural gas. If the atmospheric percentage of C02 prior to the industrial era was the ideal concentration (against what standard?), then we are already screwed. Let us contrast the OH MY GOD, THE PLANET IS GETTING WARMER! problem with a few other factors related to fossil fuel consumption. First you have the food supply. We eat fruit grown in Chile and fish caught in Vietnam courtesy of rapid, fossil-fuel powered transportation. Seafood is harvested at heroic, unsustainable rates by diesel-powered trawlers. Grain is grown with fertilizers and pesticides produced by the Petrochemical industry, irrigated from slow-to-refresh aquifers (another problem, but what the hell), harvested by diesel tractors and combines, and moved to market by diesel transport. Our population has burgeoned to a level sustainable only by massive amounts of readily available (read - fossil fuel) energy, and we are past peak oil. FWIW, when the US dollar tanks, we in the US of A will go from 20 million barrels per day to 5 million barrels per day, pretty much overnight. When that happens, we're scrod. Like it or not, global warming or climate change or whatever you wish to call it is a self-correcting issue by comparison to the more immediate and dire problems we face. If climate change was anywhere near the most serious problem we faced, we would be in fantastic shape by comparison. As it stands, the greenhouse gas issue is but a side effect of the process by which we are authoring our own doom, and focusing on it as a primary issue is nonsensical. It's like changing a tire on a car stuck on railroad tracks - yeah changing the tire is important, but if you don't get the bloody car off the tracks before the Express comes through, it is of relatively little importance. If you want to address greenhouse gases, you will have to do it as part of getting the population of the planet below 1.5 billion if you want me to take the proposal seriously. 100 thousand people driving around in coal-fired locomotives have less impact than 10 billion people riding bicycles and using candles for illumination. If Al Gore espouses something, you can bet there is something conceptually wrong with it. Unnaturally blue skies, Winsor

"It's good to be the King!" Mel Brooks

How the heck did they lose almost 55,000 bodies? That seems rather impossible to do. Thanks for the amazing photos. For all the attention given to the machine gun and gas, the bulk of the battlefield casualties were the result of artillery. The non-combat deaths due to disease were off the scale as well, but they generally knew the identity of troops who succumbed at the hospital or aid station. When receiving a direct hit from a big gun, it may be difficult to collect enough remains to perform DNA testing, and what remains of the ID tag could wind up a long, long way away. At Verdun, some 60,000,000 shells of calibre 75mm or larger were expended over a 10 month period in an area of 10 sq. km. It is ill advised even now to wander about looking for souveniers, since 2 or 3 people are blown to smithereens each year by setting off duds that took 9 decades to go bang. Going off the path is a bad idea also from the standpoint that there is hardly a square metre that does not consist of one or more overlapping craters. Any body that was not collected immediately was likely vaporized at some later date by subsequent hits. One charming side effect was that the countryside was thus coated with a patina of rotting human flesh for months on end. Drinking from a puddle was akin to sampling a petri dish of human-specific pathogens. At the Ossuary at Douamont there are collected the bones of some hundreds of thousands of dead - French, German and only God knows who. In front of the Ossuary are 25,000 graves where they had enough to bury, though a large number of them are unknown. Fully 1/3 of the Commonwealth graves read "Here Lies a Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God." The French version reads something like "Mort Pour le Patrie." A trip through the Western Front is something you are not likely to forget. I sure as hell was not braced for it. BSBD, Winsor

I say fine. The only condition I put on it is that anyone applying for reparations be immediately stripped of US citizenship and sent to the point at which their forebears were placed into bondage - a minimum of one continent away. If you think being in this country is such a bad thing, that dreadful circumstance should be corrected forthwith. I am a little sick of group A), B) or C) bitching about how tough it is for them. If you want sympathy, I understand it may be found in your Funk and Wagnalls somewhere between "shit" and "syphilis." Xin loi. Winsor

Who cares if they rigged an election? Many other governments have done that. ....Ours too. Look at LBJ. Oh, so you are going to complain about Texans being sufficiently well-organzed that they can vote in alphabetical order? Or maybe you will criticize the education system's consistency, such that the handwriting from one ballot to the next appears identical? Criticize Johnson all you wish, but he had the support of 107% of the electorate. What a guy.

That's Buffalo Springfield; S&Y of CSN&Y were members.

Would you be so kind as to explain the difference for us? What, precisely, makes the chemical reaction of an explosion different from the chemical reaction of a "rapid burn?" It is the difference between detonation and deflagration. The basic principle is that the propellant should release just enough energy at a given time to keep the chamber pressure within limits while accelerating the projectile. Thus, as the projectile accelerates, the propellant continues to combust at a nonlinear rate to trade chemical for kinetic energy. One principle in Gas Dynamics is that between pressure vessels, the maxim speed of a fluid at the tightest constriction (like the bore) is Mach 1 for the fluid in question. The way we get around that is by the phase change between solid and vapor the whole way down the barrel; the faster it goes, the more chemical energy goes right to kinetic without increasing pressure. Propellants intended for high velocity projectiles typically have a "deterrent coating," which makes them a bitch to light and limits the released energy until everything has begun to accelerate. Replacing propellants with explosives is an effective way to booby trap ammunition. Firing a cartridge loaded with an RDX (cyclonite) based charge, such as composition B-4 or C-4, will blow up the breech and maim anyone unfortunate enough to be too close. It gets more complicated from there, but I assure you that, just because there is a "bang" involved, there need not be "explosives" at work. Without being contained, smokeless propellants in bulk burn with a most impressive "WHOOSH!" Blue skies, Winsor

FWIW, smokeless powder is not an explosive - it is a propellant. It does not explode, it burns (very rapidly, but burn it does). The lead styphnate in primers qualifies as an explosive, but it is such a small percentage of the overall mass of ammunition that its effect is marginalized. Having been a fireman (with a volunteer company), I can assure you that I know a hell of a lot more about the characteristics of burning ammunition from my experience as a firearms instructor and handloader than do 99% of firefighting personnel out there. As an aside, composition C-4 burns quite nicely if ignited by flame in the open, and works great for heating C rations. The important thing to remember is to let it burn out by itself - if you try to stamp it out, it remembers that it is high explosive immediately. BSBD, Winsor