Tuesday - November 01, 2011

Pre-Flight Jitters? Who me?

YIKES. Polish 767 flies out of Newark airport, flies to Poland, forgets the wheels, lands anyway. Video at the link! Everyone is fine.

And I don’t even want to think about this one.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/01/2011 at 03:31 PM   
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   Monday - October 31, 2011

Just Missed Us

CENTRAL JERSEY — Trick-or-treating has been postponed until Friday in Bernardsville, Long Hill and at least one other New Jersey town, but Halloween festivities are a secondary concern among officials scrambling to clear roadways and restore power to hundreds of thousands of state residents in the aftermath of a “winter” storm that struck nearly two months before the official start of winter.

Public Halloween activities will be permitted on Friday in Bernardsville, according to a notice posted to its municipal website, while Long Hill is exploring the possibility of allowing trick-or-treating on Sunday. Chester, in Morris County, also has suspended trick-or-treating activities until Friday, while more than 30 Garden State school districts were closed Monday.

More than 400,000 New Jersey households remained without power midday Monday, down from about 750,000 in the immediate aftermath of the storm that moved through Saturday into early Sunday, according to figures released by the office of Gov. Chris Christie. At least 115,000 households in Middlesex, Somerset, Union and Hunterdon counties lost power, and tens of thousands remained without power Monday afternoon. About 95 percent of power restorations were expected to be completed by the end of the day on Thursday, but isolated pockets of outages are expected to persist even longer than that.

Across the state line into New York the situation is about the same. Most of the snow has melted or compacted by now: while the stupid Occupy Wall Street losers only got a 1.4” dusting, large parts of NJ and “upstate” NY were hit with half a foot to a foot and a half. New England got hammered just as hard, so they’re in this same leaky boat too.

My mother hasn’t had power since Saturday. At this point they’re starting to throw out the contents of the freezer. No heat, no light, but at least it’s not freezing out and they can always light the gas stove manually. They don’t expect to have power until Thursday. “Thursday” seems to be the watchword here as well. We live on the west side of town, the uphill end, and for whatever reason we have underground lines and are connected to a different power grid. Our lights were off a few times for very short periods, perhaps 10 - 20 minutes total. Go down a mile into town and there is no electricity. It’s like there’s a line. Or a river, actually; to the west of the South Branch of the Raritan things are fine, but to the east the folks are deep in the caca. Stores are closed, gas stations not open. The local A&P is trying to stay open, but all the frozen food, meat, deli, and bakery goods are going in the dumpster. And the whole store has about 8 lights on. Lucky them that they’re an old store, with an emergency generator and about 5000 gallons of propane tanks out behind the place. Out our way, the Shop Rite up on the hill is perfectly fine and doing a land office business.

Once again we got lucky.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/31/2011 at 02:06 PM   
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Good Grief

Don’t look at me, I had nothing to do with it.

Demographers say it took until 1804 for the world to reach its first billion people, and a century more until it hit 2 billion in 1927. The twentieth century, though, saw things begin to cascade: 3 billion in 1959; 4 billion in 1974; 5 billion in 1987; 6 billion in 1998.

The U.N. estimates the world’s population will reach 8 billion by 2025 and 10 billion by 2083. But the numbers could vary widely, depending on everything from life expectancy to access to birth control to infant mortality rates.

Huh, if you look at those numbers, it actually means the population growth rate is slowing down a little bit, and the future rate is expected to slow even more. But still, seven billion people? And more than a third of them in China and India alone. Egads.

In Uttar Pradesh, India — the most populous state in the world’s second-most populous country — officials said Monday they would be appointing seven girls born Monday to symbolize the 7 billion.

India, which struggles with a deeply held preference for sons and a skewed sex ratio because of millions of aborted female fetuses, is using the day to highlight that issue.

“It would be a fitting moment if the 7 billionth baby is a girl born in rural India,” said Dr Madhu Gupta, an Uttar Pradesh gynecologist. “It would help in bringing the global focus back on girls, who are subject to inequality and bias.”

According to U.S. government estimates, India has 893 girls for every 1,000 boys at birth, compared with 955 girls per 1,000 boys in the United States.

On Monday, the chosen Indian babies were being born at the government-run Community Health Center in the town of Mall, on the outskirts of the Uttar Pradesh capital of Lucknow.

Six babies were born from midnight to 8 a.m. Monday. Four were boys.

Meanwhile China, which at 1.34 billion people is the world’s most populous nation, said it would stand by its one-child policy, a set of restrictions launched three decades ago limiting most urban families to one child and most rural families to two.

“Overpopulation remains one of the major challenges to social and economic development,” Li Bin, director of the State Population and Family Planning Commission, told the official Xinhua News Agency. He said the population of China would hit 1.45 billion in 2020.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/31/2011 at 01:56 PM   
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Ghost story claimed to be true. You decide.

I came across this story in our paper way back in June.  Held for posting till today.
Enjoy.

The ghost that tried to sell me her house: Anne Diamond used to scoff at stories of haunted homes until she had a very spooky encounter

By ANNE DIAMOND

First, I should say that I don’t believe in ghosts. Never have. I’m far too sensible ever to be spooked by the unexplained or mysterious.
But when the postman told me: ‘They found her lying on the living room floor; she’d been dead for two weeks,’ his words sent a chill down my spine.
They still do, more than a decade later, because those words were the final twist in the tale of my very own ghost story.

Heavens above: Anne Diamond had a dead scary encounter while trying to buy a house

It was shortly after my much publicised divorce in 1999 that I began house hunting; looking for a new headquarters for me and my four boys, our nanny, and visiting relatives and friends.

Up until then, we’d been in a huge sprawl of a manor house, complete with 17th-century spiders, and I wanted something altogether more compact, with easy access to shops and bus routes for the boys to attend their various schools.
I really fancied one of those gorgeous Regency terraces in Leamington Spa, but when the agent rang and told me about a large, detached, Victorian family house near Warwick Castle, with its own granny annexe and a picturesque well in the garden, I got ‘that feeling’ that perhaps this was the one.
He said the property was just about to come onto the market - he hadn’t even prepared the details - but, perhaps, I would like to see it straightaway?
As my car crunched on the gravel of the imposing driveway, I was excited.
The castle loomed high on its hill nearby, the shops were near but not too close, and there was a bus stop just a few houses away. The house was shielded by huge fir trees (very Narnia, I thought) and a large double gate had been opened for me to enter.

Anne Diamond never realised house-buying could be so hair-raising

As I approached the door, it was opened by a white-haired elderly lady who was friendly and chatty as she showed me around what was clearly a much-loved home.
She said she’d brought up her children there - but they now lived abroad and were pressing her to sell the house and move into a retirement flat. She said she’d be sad to leave, but happier to think the house would ring to the sound of children’s laughter again.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve got an enormous family and we love parties!’ and she seemed genuinely touched when I told her about us, where my boys went to school (her son had attended the same) and how we loved the area.

I did rather hope to win her over, because I didn’t want her to put the house on the general market. I wanted to snap it up before others started looking around.
So, as soon as I got home, I rang the agent, told him I loved it, and offered the asking price. Deal done, he and I thought, and I immediately started dreaming of my plans for the place.

So I was devastated when, only a week or so later, the agent rang and told me that the house had been taken off the market, because the old lady had decided not to sell after all.

She sent her apologies, he told me, but said she simply couldn’t bear to leave the place.
Was there anything I could do to change her mind, I asked? No, he replied: this sort of thing happens all the time in his world.

Very often, he added, vendors do it just to see how much money their house is worth while they make retirement plans. 
Disappointed, I started house hunting all over again. But you never really forget a house that you’ve fallen in love with.

Then, out of the blue, about six months later, the agent rang to tell me the house was back on the market. It was now empty and ready for a quick sale for just a couple of thousand pounds more. Was I still interested? If I called around right now, he’d give me the keys and let me show myself around. My mum had been staying with us so I took her with me as she has a keen eye for property. We collected the keys and made our way.
This time, the gates were firmly shut, and I had to open them with the large, jangling bunch of keys I’d been given.

But, as we stood on the doorstep and I fumbled for the front door key, the door opened and the smiling little white-haired old lady was there welcoming us in, just as before. She apologised for the place looking so bare and unfriendly. She beamed when I introduced my mother, and then added: ‘You know the layout, I’ll leave you to show yourselves around . . .’ With that, she shuffled off, a thin, pale figure, towards the kitchen.

The light was fading, I remember, so my mother and I decided to have a look at the upstairs rooms first, and work our way down. The rooms seemed huge without any furniture and the whole place echoed eerily. That was when I tried to switch the lights on, and realised the electricity had been turned off.

We made our way down the stairs and my mother called out to the lady, to ask if she had a torch. But we couldn’t find her anywhere. I remember thinking how odd it was that she’d let us in, and then abandoned us in the dark.
Never mind, we thought, we’ll have a quick peek at the downstairs rooms, and let ourselves out.

Even though there were no curtains in any of the tall, sash windows, there was very little light to see by. Outside, those massive fir trees cast long shadows, and the privacy I’d so valued suddenly became a bit gloomy.
My mum sat down and sighed: ‘We can’t really see anything now, but I can tell it’s a wonderful house. Big, solid, sensible, lots of rooms: you could do a lot with this place.’

‘We bolted for the front door and only felt safe in the car’

And as she chattered on, we both suddenly became aware that she was, indeed, sitting on something. Yet the room, like the rest of the house, had seemed utterly empty just a few minutes ago.

My mother sprang up - and we both peered at the large object she’d been sitting on.
In the dark, it seemed like a large wardrobe lying on its back in the middle of the living room. ‘I don’t like this,’ my mum whispered. ‘It’s the shape of a coffin.’
Neither of us are superstitious, and we both instinctively know that most ‘inexplicable’ things can be explained somehow, and that imaginations run wild in the dark. But we both bolted for the front door, and only felt safe again once in the car, driving away.

Next morning, I called around to the estate agent to return the keys and explain why I’d left without closing and locking the gate.
The agent was adamant: no one could possibly have been there to let us in, he said. There were no neighbours with keys. I had the only set.
He explained that the old lady I had met the first time, the owner, had died quite suddenly, and her children had cleared out the place and put it back on the market.

That had all happened weeks ago. She was dead and buried. No way could it have been her who let us in yesterday.
But what about the huge box in the middle of the floor?
‘The place is totally empty, I assure you,’ he said, by now convinced I was a nutter.
To quell my fears, he offered to take me round to the house then and there. So we revisited it.
Again, the house looked warm and welcoming in the morning sun. And there was nothing in the living room, at all. 
‘Do you still want to buy it?’ he asked.
‘No way, not now,’ I replied.

As I was climbing back into my car, the postman walked past.
‘Are you going to buy that house?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t think it’s right for me,’ I sighed.
He went on: ‘It’s been with the same family for years and years. But it was very sad how the old lady died.
‘She was in the house for two weeks before anyone found her.
‘In the end, they had to break in - and there she was, just lying dead on the living room floor.’

Half of me is convinced I did the right thing by walking away from that house. The other half will always wonder.

Did that little old lady come back from the dead to make sure I bought it? She’d seemed so keen at the time that her lovely house should go to another big family, to fill it with joy and laughter.

Perhaps she returned, ghost-like, to show me around one last time?
But even that thought still doesn’t explain the box in the middle of the living room. That was just one Gothic step too far.

-30-

(from June issue of the Daily Mail)

For those interested in spooky castles like the one mentioned above, see England’s haunted castles and churches

Posted by peiper     on 10/31/2011 at 05:35 AM   
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   Wednesday - October 19, 2011

Hang Them Harder

The “House of Horrors” story continues to evolve. It seems like every 4 hours there’s a new piece of news; the depravity gets worse and worse.

Tuesday 10:23pm
PHILADELPHIA - Fox 29 has learned six children are in protective custody in the Philadelphia house of horrors case, and there may be more houses in the case.

The children were taken into custody by police on Monday night, and they are children of the suspects and one of the victims found in a dungeon basement last Saturday.

Two of the children belong to Tamara Breeden, who was found in the dungeon basement.

Also, the niece of one of Linda Weston, the alleged ring leader in the case, was found living in squalid conditions in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. The niece is 19 years old, appeared to be beaten and malnourished.

Philadelphia police now have an SUV used to move around the group of mentally challenged people found locked up in a squalid basement, and they are looking for a larger van.

Police are digging deep into Weston’s past. They’re looking at her post office boxes, bank accounts and any properties she may be tied to. They hope is to find clues that lead them to any other victims out there.

Philadelphia police Commissioner Charles Ramsey says that from the depths of a basement dungeon has sprung a wide-sweeping investigation that now has him concerned about the welfare of 50 more potential victims.

Ramsey plans to form a new task force to track down each and every potential victim linked to Weston.

“Could there be victims who are no longer with us? I don’t know and I don’t want to alarm anyone who may have a relative that could be a part of this,” Ramsey said.

Commissioner Ramsey is also looking into another report from Weston’s own son who says he reported another possible kidnapping by his mother two years ago.

Wednesday 8:46am
PHILADELPHIA - More victims have been found in connection with that “house of horrors” case.

Police now say six children and four young adults, ranging in age from 2 to 19, are in protective custody, FOX 29’s Steve Keeley reported live Wednesday morning from police headquarters.

“It’s a very complicated case. It continues to unfold. This is another major step,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said Tuesday night.

The 10 young people all have ties to the case. Two of the children were born to Tamara Breeden, who is one of the four victims found locked inside the basement of an apartment building in Tacony.
...
Police also found the niece of alleged ringleader Linda Ann Weston inside a home in Frankford. She had been reported missing since 2009.

“She is 19 years old. She appears to be severely malnourished. She looks like she’s been beaten a large part of her life,” Ramsey said.

Three of the children were taken from the same Longshore Avenue apartment building in Tacony where the four developmentally-disabled adults from a sub-basement “dungeon.”

Weston had a daughter and son living in the building. The daughter and two children, believed to be hers, were taken into custody.

Police aren’t even sure yet whether the daughter is a victim or a perpetrator at this point.

Walking into work Wednesday morning, Ramsey said, “When I left last night, that decision had not been made. But we hade DAs present at the time. So, they will determine whether or not there’s anything that she could be charged with, or she’s just a victim herself.”

Police did not divulge exactly where the other young people were found, including whether they were at one or more houses. They also were not commenting on what the conditions were like.

A special task force has been created to follow-up on numerous leads that are coming in from across the country.

Philadelphia police seized a Ford expedition with a Florida license plate found Tuesday in the city. Investigators believe this is the vehicle Weston allegedly used to haul the adults victims across the country from Texas to Florida, and then here to Philadelphia.

Records also indicate that Weston spent time in Virginia and North Carolina.

Police allege that all of this is part of a Social Security check-cashing scheme in which the suspects, including Weston, who is a convicted felon, can aquire checks for other people with no identification and cash them for years and years.

Asked if the case highlights flaws in the system, Ramsey said, “Well, yeah, I mean obviously I think it shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. She used her own name in many instances.”

Wednesday 9:23am
PHILADELPHIA - Sources tell Fox 29 that Tamara Breeden, a woman allegedly held captive in a Philadelphia basement, gave birth to two children after she went missing.
...
On Wednesday, Philadelphia police also charged a fourth suspect in the case.

Jean McIntosh is being charge as a co-conspirator to the kidnapping of all four victims. She is the daughter of Linda Weston, who is believed to be the ring leader in the case.

Weston and McIntosh are also being investigated with the abuse and kidnapping of a family member, Beatrice Weston. Beatrice Weston, 19, is still being interviewed but has significant facial bruising and scarring.

Who knows how many more members of this psycho family will be arrested by noon, or how many more victims will be found, or what will turn up when the investigation gets rolling in Texas and Florida, and now Virginia and North Carolina. It’s looking like this gang had several vehicles, perhaps a small fleet, and moved from place to place with their flock of prisoners. I hate to say it, but at some point the bodies will start being found; I’m certain that murder or “accidental death” was part of this as well ... and will explain the whereabouts of some of those 50 others.

Another part that rather stuns me is how welfare, Social Security, etc continued to issue checks for all these missing people for years, and nobody anywhere in any law enforcement group ever found this information. Don’t forget that this entire case came in out of the blue when the first building’s landlord investigated a strange noise in the basement. (and you’d think the aroma would have tipped him off a bit too, yes?) The cops and the feds DID NOT HAVE A CLUE that any of this was going on, yet the government has all sorts of interconnected databases, and in theory a new edict (Patriot Act) of cooperation. Hey authority figures: how about running the Missing Persons database against the Welfare Checks database and the Social Security Checks database? You might just find that vast numbers of these lost people aren’t really so lost after all. They’re “merely” prisoners held by depraved psychopaths. I am really starting to worry that this group of three four - um, what time is it, maybe it’s a dozen by now? - is just the tip of the iceberg and that a whole network of dungeons exists across the country. That’s a really scary thought.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/19/2011 at 08:28 AM   
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   Monday - October 17, 2011

No Alternate Energy Needed, Part 2

"We’re running out of fossil energy! We need to invest massive amounts of tax money in green energy right now!!!”

Gaffney, Cline & Associates (GCA) said Turkmenistan’s South Iolotan natural gas field is the world’s second-largest, with an estimated 21.2 trillion cu m (tcm) of gas reserves. Supergiant Iolotan field was discovered in the country’s Amu Daria basin in late-2006 (OGJ Online, Nov. 22, 2006).

In a recent presentation, Jim Gillett, GCA business development manager, said South Iolotan’s latest reserves estimate make it second only to giant South Pars gas field, shared by Iran and Qatar.

“Turkmenistan’s gas reserves are more than enough for any potential demand over the foreseeable future, whether it be from China, Russia, Iran, or Europe,” Gillett said.

However, Gillet said estimates of the central Asian nation’s reserves could increase even more, noting that in addition to South Iolotan, the country’s Yashlar field has substantial gas, too.

“The current estimated data for both South Iolotan and Yashlar may well increase still further as additional data are acquired,” Gillett said. Yashlar, a separate field, could contain 1.45-5 tcm, he said.

Under a previous estimate made by GCA, South Iolotan field was believed to hold as much as 14 tcm of gas.

The world uses about 2.4 trillion cubic meters of natural gas per year; the Yashlar field could feed the world for a whole year all by itself. So call it 9 years from the first field, 10 years altogether. That’s natural gas from just one country, from just two gas producing regions. Not to mention that existing wells the world over already supply just a bit more gas than currently gets used. Or any of the new fields that get discovered all the time, like the one in CA I wrote about the other day. Or the ones way up north that we’re only just starting to look for, now that some of the ice and snow has gone away so that we can look.

Natural gas burns pretty clean, leaving behind just CO2 and steam. And plans have already been figured out how to pull massive amounts of CO2 out of the air and pump it back into those old gas wells that have run dry. So there.

h/t to EagleSpeak

Posted by Drew458     on 10/17/2011 at 10:29 AM   
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   Monday - October 10, 2011

Curiosity Killed The Drew

then went to here:

with a side trip here:

and wound up here:

It was a really nice early fall day yesterday so we took a drive out into the local hinterlands and had a bit of a ramble. We went out along the Musconetcong River for about a dozen miles, up over into Port Murray on the outskirts of Hackettstown then back up and over the mountains into High Bridge and Lebanon Township. It’s a pretty drive through the woods and fields; this part of the state is lightly populated, what I call exoburban, but that gives way to farmlands and forests within half a mile of the main roads. This area is rich in history, from colonial iron mines and forges to places where Washington’s army set up artillery batteries to stave off the British during the Revolution to many places that were once significant points in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, right on up to various modernities. Each era has left its mark on the land, although many of those landmarks are now almost lost to sight and memory. This makes a scenic drive around here a bit of a learning experience, even if a large part of that learning is done online after we get home. And it’s all connected somehow ... which is why the internet is a dangerous thing. Learning about what was and what is, and tracking down those connections can suck up your life. Hours go by; the curiosity slaked by finding one thing out is just refreshed again by seeing something else a bit related, and wanting to know more about that. And on and on it goes.

The Musconetcong River is one of those famous trout streams that the fly fishermen so love. It flows across a good part of the state from east to west, eventually joining the Delaware River at Phillipsburg on the PA border. Today it’s hard to envision such a thing, but once upon a time it was one of the major thoroughfares across the state; sections of it were part of the Morris Canal works that was built in the early 19th century.

The first picture of the little green bridge is a bit of local color. It is the earliest example of an eye-rod Warren truss adjustable tension pony bridge in NJ. It was built here in New Hampton by Francis Lowthorp in 1869 out of cast iron. This one spans the Musconetcong River in the nearby town of New Hampton. There are two other Lowthorp iron bridges here in Hunterdon County, both only a year younger and both still in use, including the rather famous one we have here in Clinton by our equally famous Red Mill.

Perhaps a mile further down Musconetcong River Road we came upon these huge and brooding stone pylons by the very edge of the street. Looking like something out of Ozymandius they shoot up out of the ground and stand 5-8 stories tall, and march down the mountainside and out across a farmer’s fields. They are the pylons for a large bridge that crossed the river at elevation. The bridge is long gone. There is no town on the top of the mountain. There is no neighborhood up there. There are no roads there, only forest. And there is nothing at the other end. So why a bridge? It turns out that this was the Changewater Trestle, a railroad bridge put up in 1859 for a railroad that ceased to exist long ago. The bridge and the tracks survived until 1959 when both were dismantled. The pylons were cut down only enough to no longer be a danger, and their bases were just left in place.

I spent a bunch of time looking at railroad history in our area. Once upon a time there were tracks everywhere. The sleepy little towns were busy with factories, the farms had to shuttle their crops to the cities (New Jersey really was the market Garden State), and of course all that coal had to be brought in from Pennsylvania. I’ve written before about Upon the Road of Anthracite, the world of coal that opened up so much of this area long ago. What struck me was the serendipity of the whole thing; half a mile south of this bridge is an old iron works, where the ore dug out of the ground in nearby High Bridge was smelted. That railroad probably carried those rough smeltings 10 miles further south to the sleepy little town of Lambertville, where the castings from the bridge were forged. So it was a very local harmonious endeavor, but it still amazes me that the pristine and spotless little towns in our area were once centers of heavy industry, little Mt. Doom zones of smoke and fire, heat and noise, danger and newly created wealth. How times change.

A tangential trip on my choo-choo research ( I guess that would be a siding in railroad terms? ) gave me the picture of the Pullman car. That’s the Union Gap diner in 1974 (note the Ford Pinto) just after it had taken delivery of the observation car from the Blue Comet, once a passenger train of the Central New Jersey Railroad, back from the days when trains had names. The diner has since been renovated and modernized, yet the train car still sticks out the side of the building. What comes around goes around: The diner is half a mile from my home, and right on the edge of Rt 78, one of NJ’s 3 east-west highways. Rt 78 follows old Rt 22. I don’t know if it once had train tracks or a canal on it, but the area is called Union Gap for a reason: this is where there was a gap in the mountains to the west, and an easy path to get to the interior of the young nation from New York City. Stage coach lines once ran up and down the road when it was just a dirt track; one of our state’s finest restaurants a couple miles west of here was a stopping point. It was the main road from New Brunswick NJ to Easton PA. Before those days George Washington could have run his battered army down that trail when Cornwallis was chasing him, even stopping off down the street here at Bonnell’s Tavern for a cold one (the building still exists but hasn’t poured a draft in 100 years) but he didn’t. He went straight across the state from New York City to Philadelphia. How about that? George Washington, inventor of the Jersey Turnpike.

Looking at railroads and bridge trusses lead me to that last picture somehow. That’s an aircraft carrier in the foreground, the HMS Argus, one of England’s earliest attempts at floating runways. It didn’t work too well. That ship started life as the Italian ocean liner Conte Rosso, but it got co-opted (laws of angary) when WWI came about. The amazing pile of girders in the background is the Firth of Forth bridge, a multiple cantilever arch truss creation up in Scotland between Edinburgh and Firth. This was the first all steel bridge ever built, and it pretty much defines Drew-spec. The bridge was tremendously overbuilt on purpose, because an earlier bridge on the Firth of Tay had collapsed in the wind and had caused the worst train disaster in history at that point. So the bridge was built about 20 times stronger than it really needed to be, to regain public confidence. 120 years later and the bridge is still so strong that it barely even wiggles even in the strongest storms. It is a huge thing, the pinnacle of Victorian engineering, stretching nearly as far as San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge (ok, 600 feet less, but still 8276 feet) built 60 years later, with foundation plinths 70 feet across that sink 90 feet or more down below the bay to bedrock, circular main beams 12 feet in diameter, and the tops of the arches 350 feet above the water. Built in less than 7 years, it can still carry two full size modern freight trains on its double tracks. While this steel giant was being built, the fwench got busy and built the Eiffel Tower. Out of wrought iron.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/10/2011 at 09:13 AM   
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   Sunday - October 09, 2011

Sunday eye-candy

Peiper, or Drew, normally do this. Peiper, don’t know why you’ve been absent, I assume that Mrs. peiper is ailing. Or maybe you are ailing? Regardless, both of you are in my prayers.

My ‘eye candy’ is a bit risqué. So, posted below the fold for either nudity, or sexual suggestiveness. Or both.

Nice lingerie!

Armed and dangerous.

I’ll take ‘Bust’ for $100 Alex.

Nice parrot. What? You didn’t notice the parrot?

GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

Posted by Christopher     on 10/09/2011 at 12:18 PM   
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   Monday - September 26, 2011

Fails the sniff test

Lots and lots of coverage around the blogosphere of NYPD Chief Ray Kelly’s statement on 60 Minutes that his cops could “take down” an airliner if necessary ...

NEW YORK — The chief of the New York Police Department says city police could take down a plane if needed.

Commissioner Ray Kelly tells CBS’ “60 Minutes” that after the Sept. 11 attacks, he decided the city couldn’t rely on the federal government alone. He set about creating the NYPD’s own counter-terrorism unit. He says the department is prepared for multiple scenarios and could even take down a plane.

Tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes featured a segment on one of the world’s most sophisticated anti-terrorism units--the New York City Police Department. Over the past decade, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly (and the city) have spent $3 billion on measures designed to prevent or mitigate future attacks.
...
Pelley: Are you satisfied that you’ve dealt with threats from aircraft, even light planes, model planes, that kind of thing?

Kelly: Well, it’s something that’s on our radar screen. I mean in an extreme situation, you would have some means to take down a plane.

Pelley: Do you mean to say that the NYPD has the means to take down an aircraft?

Kelly: Yes, I prefer not to get into the details but obviously this would be in a very extreme situation.

Pelley: You have the equipment and the training.

Kelly: Yes.

Speculation on this statement has run the gamut from it’s pure BS to they have either Avenger missile launchers (packs of Stingers mounted on Humvees) or else MANPADS (shoulder launched Stingers). Another blog says all of that is nonsense, because what they have is Barrett .50 rifles, and will shoot down the airliners from helicopters.

I say phooey to the whole thing. [Insert my standard rant about the over-militarization of the police here]

• Shooting a bullet at a jetliner, even if it’s a big bullet, is not going to do it. Even if it’s a really “long range” kind of gun, we’re still talking no more than two miles at the very most. 10,000 feet; an altitude that’s miles lower than such aircraft normally fly at. And the speed difference between even a really slow jet and a really fast helicopter is enormous. being on the order of at least 200mph. Which is about 300 feet per second, a good deal longer than the plane itself. That means leading your target by more than it’s own length, which makes a precise hit a very iffy thing. Too much deflection, too easy to take evasive action, too small a chance of making the precise hit necessary.
  
  


• Stinger missiles, whether MANPAD launched or fired from a mobile battery or even from a helicopter, are just too short range to save your bacon properly. Drag out your 30-60-90 drawing triangle, or resurrect your trig knowledge from that long ago math class and recall the 3-4-5 right triangle. The best and latest Stinger missile has a range of just 5 miles. 5 miles is the hypotenuse when the target is 3 miles away and 4 miles (20,000 feet) up, or when it’s 4 miles away and 3 miles up (almost 16,000 feet).
  
  Now, while it may be true - may be - that the 5 or 6 pounds worth of explosive would be enough to force a big jet to crash (after all, look what just one hand grenade can do to a DC-3. A grenade weighs about a pound) the problem is that the crashing airliner is still there, up in the sky, crashing. Right at you. Even if the missile blows the plane into 6 big chunks, those chunks are still moving forward at 500mph from an altitude of several miles. In other words, the plane may not hit it’s intended target, but it’s gonna make a helluva mess for someone on the ground, somewhere nearby. The only safe solution is to blow it out of the sky a long, long way away.

So the practical answer must be that the air defense tool involved is a bigger missile. Something on the order of a AIM-120 or greater, either in the air version (AMRAAM) or the ground version (SLAMRAAM). Perhaps go even larger, with the leftover old Hawk missiles gathering dust in warehouses, or some Patriot batteries. Not only do these kinds of missiles have much greater range (30 - 50 miles or more) they pack much more bang, having about the same explosive and fragmentation power as a 120mm to 155mm artillery shell ... which is plenty (50 - 80lbs). So the pieces will be much smaller, and they’ll fall much further away. Somewhere out past the end of Long Island, or 20 miles off the New Jersey shore would be just about right.

And all of this leads back to the question of the day, just what the EFF kind of police departments have we built in this country? Hardware of this magnitude has NEVER been in civilian hands before. Nor has launch authority. If Commissioner Kelly isn’t lying out his sphincter, and he does have such equipment AND the authority to deploy it ... then we have a cop with warlord like powers. If so, someone has made a huge mistake.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for air defenses around our cities. It makes sense. Heck, they used to be there; once upon a time (up to 1972) nearly two dozen anti-aircraft missile bases surrounded New York City, including one within the confines of the city proper, not 2 miles from the Bronx Zoo. Armed with nukes!  But these were all under the control of the Army, not the mayor of the city or his top cop. Has the chain of command been thrown out the window and flushed down the toilet? It would seem it must have been. I can see no other possible way that Kelly’s statement can possibly be true. What’s next for the NYPD, their own nuclear submarines? Private air craft carries? A battalion or two of tanks? His own little air force of AT-6s armed with air to air missiles? Too damn much power IMO. We have an excellent military. Defending the nation against our enemies is their job. Let them do it, and keep the plod out of it.

Besides, as I’ve said, the place to make an interception is long before the bits and pieces left afterwards can crash down on your head. That means that the threat has to be determined and validated, and the interception decision made, long before it gets near Commissioner Kelly and his blue crewed AA batteries. Which means that the local Air Force bases will have plenty of time to sortie every jet fighter they have on nearly suicidal intercept missions. So if it REALLY comes down to it, by the time the cops are shooting at jet airliners, it’s already too damn late. Might as well stand on the roof and throw rocks or shoot off bottle rockets. In other words, giving the NYPD anti-aircraft weaponry and launch authority is yet another waste of millions of dollars, and another “let no crisis go to waste” usurpation of power.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/26/2011 at 03:30 PM   
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   Sunday - September 25, 2011

racist reporting

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a fiery summons to an important voting bloc, President Barack Obama told blacks on Saturday to quit crying and complaining and “put on your marching shoes” to follow him into battle for jobs and opportunity.

And though he didn’t say it directly, for a second term, too.

Obama’s speech to the annual awards dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus was his answer to increasingly vocal griping from black leaders that he’s been giving away too much in talks with Republicans—and not doing enough to fight black unemployment, which is nearly double the national average at 16.7 percent.

“It gets folks discouraged. I know. I listen to some of y’all,” Obama told an audience of some 3,000 in a darkened Washington convention center.

Uh huh. Very funny. Yup, put 3,000 black people in a convention center and it will be considerably darkened, yes it will. Raaaaaacist!!!

He acknowledged blacks have suffered mightily because of the recession, and are frustrated that the downturn is taking so long to reverse. “So many people are still hurting. So many people are barely hanging on,” he said, then added: “And so many people in this city are fighting us every step of the way.”

But Obama said blacks know all too well from the civil rights struggle that the fight for what is right is never easy.

“Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. “Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”

Bedroom slippers? Bedroom slippers? Is that a reference to that old comfortable shoes routine? Yes’m, yes it be. Horry Clap, raaaaaaacist metaphors straight from the President! That must have been his white half talking.

Obama said the package of payroll tax cuts, business tax breaks and infrastructure spending will benefit 100,000 black-owned businesses and 20 million African-American workers. Republicans have indicated they’re open to some of the tax measures—but oppose his means of paying for it: hiking taxes on top income-earners and big business.

Oh pure genius, that is. Pay for the jobs bill by taxing the very businesses that are going to be doing the hiring. That’ll work leave a mark.

PS - Last time I heard there were less than 39 million black people in the USA. If half of them are either too young or too old to work, which is reasonable, that leaves a couple million less than 20. Any time race comes up, I’m always hearing how 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 black men are in jail ... given that males are about half the population ... that’s about 2 million. So the theoretical maximum black population available for work is perhaps 16 million. Given their supposed unemployment rate that’s double the rate the rest of us have, that makes 3.2 million black people out of work. Obama’s plan is said to benefit 20 million black workers, even though about 13 million of them already have jobs and there aren’t even 20 million of them available. Go figure. Obama’s jobs plan will be a direct benefit to far more than every single one of them. MORE THAN Every. Single. One. Including all of the executives, upper managers, business owners, and the millions who already work for the various levels of government. Maybe all those extra millions of black workers live in those extra 7 states Obama believes we have. Or maybe his plan, like his math, is a wee bit flawed??

And I’m just so darn impressed our post racial president needs to pander to his color buddies and crank up the patois, just like Hillary “Know what I’m saying?” Clinton. Because it’s not about race you know. Which is why the Congressional Black Caucus is going to disband itself, right? And the pollsters and the government are going to stop even keeping racial statistics? E Pluribus Unum, content of your character not the color of your skin and all that jazz, right?

Posted by Drew458     on 09/25/2011 at 08:36 AM   
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   Wednesday - September 21, 2011

hidden in plain sight

Red perfection.

Like some of the lesser known rules in chess, the Pratchett Rules of Art (used to rationalize your interest while gazing at Three Large Pink Women and One Piece of Gauze apply to pics of naked ladies as well:
1. If there are cherubs in the picture, it’s art
2. If there are Greek urns or amphorae in the picture, it’s art. Gods and religious symbols also make the cut.
3. Same thing goes for settings in an “Arcadian Garden” setting; add a bit of statuary and it’s art.

You don’t need to be one of the gray robed Auditors to no figure out the last one:
4. If you can’t see the details, it’s art.

Either way, I’ll put things under the fold for you cubicle bound surfers.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/21/2011 at 12:23 PM   
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   Tuesday - September 13, 2011

Left Fantasy May Become Reality

"What if schools were fully funded and the military had to have a bake sale to buy bombs?” Gak, you’ve heard that one before. Now in the disarmed, fully neutered, completely dickless land of warm beer and soggy fried fish, it may just become a reality. Having rid the Royal Navy of it’s last remaining aircraft carrier, the Green Plan is neither to sell it to the wonderful Chinese nor to break it up for scrap. No, the plan is to sink it off the coast and turn it into a reef, in the belief that this will somehow earn millions. Idiots.

HMS Ark Royal could be turned into artificial diving reef

Councillors back scheme to scuttle Royal Navy’s decommissioned flagship six miles off Devon to create reef

An ambitious scheme to scuttle the decommissioned aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal off Devon to create an artificial diving reef has won the backing of councillors.

Members of Torbay council’s harbour committee voted unanimously to support the proposal to sink the Royal Navy’s former flagship six miles off the English Riviera.

There are still many hurdles for the charity behind the scheme to overcome, not least buying the vessel, which was taken out of service as part of defence cuts.

But the harbour committee’s unanimous backing of a proposal to lease part of the seabed from the Crown Estate to create a final resting place for the Ark is seen as a major step forward by the many champions of the plan in Devon.

In Torbay the idea of buying the vessel and turning it into an artificial reef was hatched over drinks at a sailing club and quickly turned into a solid plan. A charity called Wreck the World has been formed and it has put in a bid of £3.5m for the Ark.

One of the charity’s founders, Michael Byfield, said: “It’s been a steep learning curve and there are still lots of obstacles but we feel we are getting somewhere.”

Wreck the World believes that divers would be attracted to Torbay from around the world if the scheme came to fruition, bringing in an estimated £10m a year to the local economy.

Byfield said he believed it would be best to scuttle the ship so that the top of it came to rest five to 10 metres below the surface, making it accessible to many more divers than if it was sunk deeper.

He would prefer to see the Ark settle upright on the seabed, allowing less confident divers to explore areas such as the bridge while more experienced ones could venture down to the deck and hull.

Naturally, measures will have to be taken to ensure it would not pose a risk to any other shipping. Detailed environmental surveys would be carried out to check that the wreck would enhance rather than harm marine life.

Dude, 5 to 10 meters down is going to make the thing a major navigation hazard. And if you make it easily accessible to novice divers, it’s going to become a lobster pot for people. A drowning magnet. This is not a fitting end for a great ship, but a tragic and ignomious one, and what makes it worse is that Ark Royal still could have had years of active duty in her. But why on earth would an island culture, once upon a time the greatest naval power in the world, want a navy for? Sink them all, and let the greenies come dive on the hulks for self-righteous fun. Geex, what happens when you get a swelled head when you’re 20 meters down? Does that cause instant oxygen narcosis? Gosh, I hope so.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/13/2011 at 12:33 PM   
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   Saturday - September 10, 2011

Eye Candy Redux

Peiper, you’re gonna have to learn about eye-candy.

Posted below the fold because, nudity

I really like her smile.

Peiper, you may remember i really like hats:

GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

Posted by Christopher     on 09/10/2011 at 11:28 AM   
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   Friday - September 09, 2011

Hope that fixes it

We have now had an entire 24 hours without rain, and the sun even put in an appearance for half the afternoon today. While the flood waters start to recede a bit in central PA and central NY (guess I should refer to Binghamton now as my “alma mudder") I seized the chance to try and fix my car trunk.

Not sure why, but the trunk lid has been leaking. Maybe strapping giant ladders to it under tension has pulled it out of alignment a bit? Could be. After this latest deluge, when I opened the lid, at least a gallon of water poured out from the various recesses in the lid itself. The brake lights were filled with water. Not to mention the small ponds under the spare tire and in the corners. Something had to be done.

So I took the trunk lid apart, took it right off the car, dried and cleaned everything, then had a go with the silicon bathtub caulk. Everything got caulked. Every nut, every bolt, every place where a bit of plastic nestled up against a bit of metal, every gasket, every place where there was an opening. The result is ugly, big blops of white stuff everywhere, but it should be watertight now. Later on when I put the lid back on, the lock didn’t line up with the hasp. Not much good waterproofing if the trunk won’t stay shut! I figured that one out - the hasp is adjustable. To do that I had to crawl into the trunk from the backseat to get at the bolts. It wasn’t hard, but the trunk wasn’t tightly closed afterwards. That’s when I realized I needed some downforce to do the job right. So I borrowed one of the neighbors, who is not even close to anorexic, and had her sit on the trunk lid while I went inside to do the hasp bolts. Squished it right down, tight against the inner lip gasket. Now the trunk shuts tight as a drum. After the caulk was dry I took a plastic scraper around the outside of the trunk and peeled away all the extra white caulk, then covered it over with some black RTV sealant. That makes the caulking much less obvious, so I don’t feel like I’m driving a redneck spazmobile.

I bet I bailed 3 gallons of water out of the trunk wells. Let’s see what happens the next time it rains ... which might be tomorrow? 

Posted by Drew458     on 09/09/2011 at 05:01 PM   
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