This is not one of them.
The folks over at We Are The Mighty have put together a post of, as you might imagine, the 10 worst Air Forces of 2018. Sadly one of our closest allies made the list, but at #10 it was the least worst. The rest are no real surprises, but it is entertaining and the order is interesting. I’ll not clutter the place up here, so go to WATM and see for yourself.
I’m only posting this now, because Vlad Putin is Russian Orthodox and the Orthodox Church doesn’t celebrate Christmas until January. And that’s getting close. Vlad is pawing the ground and snorting. He can now claim a successful launch of a hypersonic missile (a/k/a a glide vehicle, per the story) as his ultimate answer to the US’s aggressive warmongering. Full story is at the link: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/12/26/putin-oversees-hypersonic-weapon-test-says-its-invulnerable/
These days, I can’t figure out if he’s whistling Dixie in Russian or just yankin’ us because it’s fun for him to do so.
From the article: Speaking to Russia’s top military brass after watching the live feed of the launch of the Avangard vehicle from the Defense Ministry’s control room, Putin said the successful test was a “great success” and an “excellent New Year’s gift to the nation.”
The test comes amid bitter tensions in Russia-U.S. relations, which have sunk to their lowest level since the Cold War times over the conflict in Ukraine, the war in Syria and the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Note the linkie thingie to another article in the middle of the missile test news, in which he says we’re threatening him with war. Here it is: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/12/20/putins-ominous-warning-us-is-raising-threat-of-nuclear-war/
Oh, puh-lease! Yes, Vlad, I do know about Tsar Bomba, what it was like and its range. But that was the 1960s and this is a lot later. I lived through that. So did a lot of other people I know.
We are not the ones who want nuclear war. We have always seen nukes, et al., as deterrents, not weapons. We won’t start it, but by God, we will end it. We were glad the Cold War ended. You should have learned something from that.
Be careful what you wish for, Vlad. You might not like it.
Anyway, Schastlivogo Rozhdestva.
(My Cyrillic script didn’t work here, so it’s phonetic.)
Female veterans are almost twice as likely to kill themselves as civilian women.
Pfc. Nichole Bowen-Crawford said she was walking to lunch on her Army base near Nasiriyah, Iraq, in 2003 when she received her daily proposition from a passing fellow soldier.
“Hey, Bowen,” the officer tossed out, “let’s go f— in the bunker.”
Bowen-Crawford told VOA that while this was the most shocking example of the day-to-day regimen of verbal sexual harassment she experienced while in the Army between 2001-2004, it was not her worst experience — she had been assaulted by a higher-ranking sergeant earlier that year.
When she reported the incident to a male supervisor, she was advised to stay quiet for the sake of her career.
Ummm… No Pfc. Nichole Bowen-Crawford I do not believe you. An “officer” that said such a thing to anyone let alone a Private would find his and or her ass in deep shit. The probability that an Officer cares less about their “career” than a Private does is nonsense.
“Certainly a mental health diagnosis like PTSD is a risk factor for suicide,” said Megan McCarthy, VA deputy director of suicide prevention. “Certainly, there’s some evidence that experiencing MST (Military Sexual Trauma) is associated with suicidal thoughts and behaviors, so those that have experienced MST are more likely to think about suicide and possibly more likely to attempt suicide.”
McCarthy told VOA that the relationship between suicide and trauma is complex. The VA’s own research has shown that veterans who experience MST tend to be at higher risk for suicide. A 2016 VA survey of 60,000 veterans found that more than 41 percent of female veterans had experienced sexual harassment.
Quoting, “The VA’s own research…” does not add any credibility to the matter. We have seen so many of these Posturing for Profit studies its hard to believe anything they report.
Women are not experiencing increased Sexual Harassment in the military. That is simply not true. Does it happen? Sadly, yes it does. What women in the military are experiencing is a lowering of the bar for what defines sexual harassment.
How about one of those fancy studies to determine how many times during a woman’s career they use their sexuality for their own benefit. Find me in a drunken stooper and I can give you a dozen examples off the top of my head.
How about another one of those fancy studies to determine how many times some woman makes false claims.
How about “they” do a study to see what the effects of making every veteran in the country a victim of something are and what that is doing to us as a Nation.
You can read the rest of this Posturing for Profit nonsense at the link below.
Source: Female Veterans Quietly Struggle With Sexual Harassment, Suicide
Antwine Lamar Matthews, Rakeem Spivey, Jimmy Dunbar Jr, Wendell Wilkins and David Paul Dempsey have been indicted on federal charges including extortion and wire fraud.
Five inmates in South Carolina extorted some $560,000 from hundreds of service members by using contraband cellphones to pose as underage women on dating sites, authorities say.
Standing in front of a state prison on Wednesday in Columbia, US Attorney Sherri Lydon told reporters that Antwine Lamar Matthews, Rakeem Spivey, Jimmy Dunbar Jr, Wendell Wilkins and David Paul Dempsey had been indicted on federal charges including extortion and wire fraud.
Ten others throughout the Carolinas have been charged with helping the inmates collect extortion payments via services including Western Union or PayPal.
According to court documents, inmates used contraband phones to join dating websites, pretending to be women as they contacted and exchanged nude images with military personnel throughout the country.
For $560,000 you can call me and I will pretend to be anything you want … just sayin.
Once the targets had been reeled in, inmates then posed as an authority figure, such as a father or police officer, claiming the girl with whom the victim had been communicating was underage and demanding money to keep the exchanges private, according to Drew Goodridge of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
Fearful they’d be accused of disseminating child pornography, possibly losing their military careers, more than 442 service members handed over more than $560,000 total between September 2015 and January 2018, authorities said.
The inmates involved were identified in five federal indictments released Wednesday, according to WIS10. The indictments are outlined below:
- Between September 2015 and December 2017, victims wired more than $29,000 to Malcom Cooper, Andreika Mouzon and Flossie Brockington, who transferred the money to Antwine Lamar Matthews and other inmates, sometimes taking a cut
- Roselyn Pratt helped inmate Rakeem Spivey fraudulently collect more than $5,000 in 2016
- Mitchlene Padgett helped inmate Jimmy Dunbar Jr extort nearly $30,000 between May 2016 and December 2017
- Jalisa Thompson, of Spartanburg, and Tiffany Reed, of Charlotte, helped inmate Wendell Wilkins obtain at least $80,000 from military personnel between February 2016 and January 2018. Thompson and Reed, as well as Brandon Thompson and Laben McCoy, then laundered the money
- Edgar Jermaine Hosey, of Aiken, helped inmate David Paul Dempsey extort money from military personnel between May 2016 and December 2017
You can read all about these poor military victims at the link below. Not sure if they have a GoFundMe set up yet. Poor guys, they are all guys right?
It seems that Vlad Putin is taking a stab at using nuclear-powered rockets to send stuff to Mars.
Now, considering that rocket propulsion systems require a “push” to reach delta V (escape velocity, as shown in the Soyuz MS-10 photo), it is not clear exactly how the Russians intend to produce that effect. It’s not quite the same thing as using nuclear fuel to heat water to produce electricity and drive a big nuke bird farm, or even using Bernoulli’s principle to make a caterpillar drive propel a submarine, like that Big Pig in the “Hunt For Red October”. (One of Sean Connery’s better movies.)
There’s no real explanation on how this nukey spacebird will manage to escape the chains of Earth and touch the Heavens. However, I’ve included a link to the original article at BGR, which tells us that Elon Musk’s reusable rockets will soon be outdated because Russia’s will be one better. https://bgr.com/2018/11/14/russia-nuke-rocket-spacex-rocket/
And apparently, the US is bringing back an old tech program abandoned in the 1970s, which someone brought up in the comments for the article about the Russian announcement at WUWT.
I’m really more interested in how a nuclear-powered engine can get something that big off the ground, never mind into Space. I understand how reactors work (at the basic level). I’m just curious as to what they intend to use for the propulsion system to create the liftoff. I’m guessing, however, that they’d use conventional fuels to get liftoff and reach escape velocity, and then switch over to the nuclear engine to keep propulsion stable and control spin/yaw/wobble/whatever floats your boat.
I’m leaving this for you nukey birds to discuss at length and confuse us mere mortals, and have some fun on a snowy Saturday.
Emergency responders move equipment across Route 21 in Port Wentworth, Georgia, where a WC-130 cargo plane from the Puerto Rico Air National Guard crashed on May 2. The plane was on its way to Tuscon, Arizona, where it was to be decommissioned. All nine people on board were killed. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Military.com | By Oriana Pawlyk
The Air Force WC-130H aircraft veered to the left on the runway, almost rolling into the grass before the crew was able to get it airborne.
The pilot quickly made the decision to return to the Georgia airfield they had just departed. The pilot directed the shutdown of engine one, operating on the remaining three.
“Coming back,” the pilot repeated five times over the next 30 seconds.
Investigators said that within those few seconds the pilot improperly applied nine more degrees with the left rudder, “which resulted in a subsequent skid below three-engine minimum controllable airspeed, a left-wing stall, and the [mishap aircraft’s] departure from controlled flight.”
No other “meaningful direction” was given to the crew other than an order to “brace” just before impact.
The plane was airborne for two minutes overall before it crashed down into Georgia State Highway 21 roughly 1.5 miles northeast of the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport, killing all aboard.
A newly released mishap report determined that the WC-130 crash that claimed the lives of nine members of the Puerto Rico Air National Guard earlier this year was largely due to pilot error. But troubling engine and maintenance issues documented in the aging aircraft raise more questions about the cause of the catastrophic May 2 mishap.
The last link in the accident chain, the catastrophic end to the flight. From what is written here, seems there was an intermittent propeller rpm fluctuation issue on the Number One engine (outboard, left wing). Maintenance was conducted and the problem couldn’t be reproduced.
The fluctuations occurred again right at rotation- the lurch to the left. The crew managed to get the bird aloft and made the right decision to return to the field. I think from the video they feathered Number One then. Maneuvering with an engine out isn’t something most aircraft routinely do; it’s an emergency condition after all, but one pilots are trained to handle. The end factor seems to be pilot error, but the links that put that aircraft in that condition at that place is a matter for the Accident Board for discover- and it did. What was discovered isn’t pretty. What a terrible day.
More can be found at Military.com
A gunman has opened fire at a bar in the city of Thousand Oaks. The shooter stormed the venue armed with guns and smoke grenades. A deputy sheriff was killed during the attack.
Tattooed trenchcoat-wearing ex-Marine, 29, is identified as gunman who massacred twelve people during student night at country bar: Suspect killed himself after hurling smoke grenades onto dance floor and slaying cop in California
- Ian Long, 29, opened fire at Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, Southern California, at 11.20pm
- He was dressed in all-black and let off at least 30 shots from a pistol with extended mags
- Long also let off smoke grenades to confuse the terrified crowds
- He killed himself after killing 11 people inside the bar and a sheriff’s sergeant who responded to the scene
- There were around 100 people inside the bar, including some who were under 21, who were there to dance
- The College Country Night is a regular fixture and youngsters from nearby colleges can go and stamp black X’s on their hands to mark that they won’t drink
- Some of those inside were students at Pepperdine University and others are thought to have gone to California Lutheran University – both are Christian schools
Source: California shooting: Twelve dead at Thousand Oaks music bar | Daily Mail Online
Band of Brothers penned by Stephen Ambrose and published in 1992, became the critically acclaimed series in 2001. What a great book and series they are. I have the book, and received the CD set as a gift from my son. Once a year or so I’ll declare Band of Brothers Day, and watch the entire set.
War History Online has done its research, and this is the result. Set some time aside, as it is no small production, and well worth the time.
Click on the link and see for yourself.