Thursday - June 01, 2006

Through The Looking Glass

“Defending Liberty”
_{USAF Photo}

Thursday, May 25, 2006: A P-51 Mustang, flown by Jim Beasley; an F-16 Fighting Falcon, flown by Maj. Dax Cornelius from Hill Air Force Base, Utah; an F-15 Eagle, flown by Capt. Tony Bierenkoven from Eglin AFB, Fla.; and an A-10 Thunderbolt II, flown by Capt. Jeff Yost of Pope AFB, N.C., fly over the Statue of Liberty. The “Heritage Flight” pilots flew in the Jones Beach Air Show on Long Island. Heritage Flight formations are designed to show generations of fighter aircraft.
-- (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Ben Bloker)

Trivia: How man of you can identify the island in the upper right background without using Google?

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/01/2006 at 06:24 PM   
Filed Under: • Art-Photography • Military •  
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An Inconvenient Lunatic

_{Mike Lester - Rome News-Tribune (GA)}

- CNN: “ Lights, Camera, Al Gore!”

Gore’s new movie has something of a mutant-action-hero plotline of its own. It’s the tale of a scorned, washed-up politician transformed into a laptop-wielding ninja whose PowerPoint could rescue the planet from the forces of greed and indifference. Everyone in the Democratic Party seems to be asking the same questions: Could all this be a prelude to another presidential run? Could the new Al Gore be the answer for a party in which so many are discomfited by the fact that Senator Hillary Clinton is looking increasingly inevitable as the 2008 nominee even though she’s commonly seen as unelectable?

There was plenty of renewable energy around the prospect of an Al-vs.-Hillary smackdown last week. New York magazine’s cover story on Gore, written by John Heilemann, carried the headline: THE UN-HILLARY. And while Gore was basking in solar-drenched adulation at Cannes, Clinton was presenting her own energy plan in an hourlong wonkathon at the National Press Club in Washington. As Clinton showed her command of the intricacies of carbon-dioxide sequestration and cellulosic ethanol, it was impossible not to wonder whether the two of them might once again be crowding onto the same turf.

- New York Times: “Studies Portray Tropical Arctic in Distant Past”

The first detailed analysis of an extraordinary climatic and biological record from the seabed near the North Pole shows that 55 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was much warmer than scientists imagined — a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees. Two scientists cutting a core into sections on the drill ship Vidar Viking during a 2004 mission by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.

The findings, published today in three papers in the journal Nature, fill in a blank spot in scientists’ understanding of climate history. And while they show that much remains to be learned about climate change, they suggest that scientists have greatly underestimated the power of heat-trapping gases to warm the Arctic. Previous computer simulations, done without the benefit of seabed sampling, did not suggest an ancient Arctic that was nearly so warm, the authors said. So the simulations must have missed elements that lead to greater warming.

“Something extra happens when you push the world into a warmer world, and we just don’t understand what it is,” said one lead author, Henk Brinkhuis, an expert on ancient Arctic ecology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. The studies draw on the work of a pioneering 2004 expedition that defied the Arctic Ocean ice and pulled the first significant samples from the ancient layered seabed 150 miles from the North Pole: 1,400 feet of slender shafts of muck, fossils of ancient organisms and rock representing a climate history that dates back 56 million years.

While there is ample fossil evidence around the edges of the Arctic Ocean showing great past swings in climate, until now the sediment samples from the undersea depths had gone back less than 400,000 years. The new analysis confirms that the Arctic Ocean warmed remarkably 55 million years ago, which is when many scientists say the extraordinary planetwide warm-up called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum must have been caused by an enormous outburst of heat-trapping, or greenhouse, gases like methane and carbon dioxide. But no one has found a clear cause for the gas discharge. Almost all climate experts agree that the present-day gas buildup is predominantly a result of emissions from smokestacks, tailpipes and burning forests.

The samples also chronicle the subsequent cooling, with many ups and downs, that the researchers say began about 45 million years ago and led to the cycles of ice ages and brief warm spells of the last several million years.

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/01/2006 at 02:54 PM   
Filed Under: • Environment •  
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Hillary for President!

Caught this over at WizBang this morning.  If you have the stomach for it, watch this long bio of the junior Senator from NY and tell me she isn’t running for the highest office.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/01/2006 at 11:15 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Politics •  
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Deliberance

"Say, boy! Can you play the banjo? How’s about gittin’ down to Flori-DUH and bumping off ma grandkids, OK?” Scarey, really scarey. Reading this made me wonder if theres’ any hope for the hooman race. Especially the branch down in Flori-DUH. Folks in the North Georgia mountain country or the West Virginia back hills can rest easy. There’s a new state vying for the title of “Backwoods Hick Capitol”. The picture of the perps alone is enough to scare me off lunch.

Police: Couple Offered Hit Man $100 To Kill Grandkids
_{12:05 am EDT June 1, 2006}

LAKE COUNTY, Fla. (WKMG-TV) - Two grandparents in Lake County, Fla., were arrested for allegedly offering a hit man $100 to kill their three grandchildren, daughter-in-law and the family’s pet dog, according to Local 6 News.

Lake County deputies said Robert Jackson, 60, and his wife, Versie, 59, traveled to a Best Western hotel Tuesday to meet a hit man—who was an undercover law enforcement officer.

“(The couple) met with the so-called hit man, where they paid the hit man $100 in cash as a down payment for the murder of the wife and her three children,” Lake County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Christie Mysinger said. “According to an arrest affidavit, Versie Jackson made contact with the undercover agent while her husband stayed in the car because he was reportedly too afraid the meet the person who would kill his grandchildren and daughter-in-law,” Local 6 reporter Louis Bolden said.

The couple was taken into custody after the money was exchanged. “According to an arrest affidavit, Versie Jackson made contact with the undercover agent while her husband stayed in the car because he was reportedly too afraid the meet the person who would kill his grandchildren and daughter-in-law,” Local 6 reporter Louis Bolden said.

After an investigation, authorities said the couple’s son, Jason Jackson, 31, concocted the alleged murder-for-hire plan from jail and asked his parents to seal the deal, Bolden said. The 31-year-old is awaiting trial in a sexual molestation case, and his wife and children were scheduled to testify against him.

Investigators said the rest of the money was to be paid to the hit man after the family members were killed Tuesday night. The daughter-in-law, Karen Jackson, was shocked to hear about the plan to kill her, her children and pet dog, according to Local 6 News.

“I never saw this coming,” Jackson said. “I loved (him) with all my heart. (He) was good to me and good to the kids. (He) was a nice guy, everybody’s friend. (He was) like a Ted Bundy charmer. He has to be a psychopath.”

Jackson said after her husband’s arrest last year, her in-laws stopped speaking with her. She said she plans to testify against her husband and both in-laws. Both grandparents remain in the Lake County Jail without bond.

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/01/2006 at 11:28 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Odd-Strange •  
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Achoo!

Posting may be a little light for the next day or two. I have somehow managed to come down with a miserable summertime cold and it really sucks to be me right now. I’ll do what I can. If anyone needs me I’ll be in the Captain’s cabin with a tot of rum going over the charts for these waters. Gezundheit!

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/01/2006 at 11:23 AM   
Filed Under: • Personal •  
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