"No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.” — Lily Tomlin
You really never leave
You’ve played battleship, right? Aircraft carriers are today’s battleships, and we’re all in the game, trying to guess where they are. Earlier this month—the 5th of April, a day before we struck Syria—I questioned reports saying an American aircraft carrier was on its way to strike North Korea. People were getting worked up: some were saying the […]
Is it time for another batch of photos from Pima Air & Space Museum? Let me check. Yes, my overflowing Flickr account says it is! First up, our newest exhibit, a Supermarine Spitfire Mk XIVe recently acquired from the RAF Museum in Hendon, London. The Mk XIV is a late-WWII model of the original Spitfire, […]
This article started making the rounds yesterday. One paragraph catches my eye: If you want to understand intra-GOP warfare, the decision-making process of our president, the implosion of the Republican healthcare plan, and the rest of the politics of the Trump era, you don’t need to know about Russian espionage tactics, the state of the white working class, […]
From a blog post I wrote on November 15th, one week after the election: “To the conspiracy theorists: I never thought I’d join you, but something about this election stinks. Along with GOP redistricting, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, there’s more than a whiff of Russian manipulation of electronic vote results in a few key states. […]
If we keep funding Social Security and Medicare at present levels, America will be broke in eight years. So said a Republican congressman on NPR. It’s ooga-booga, no different than stirring up poor whites with lies about inner-city blacks coming for their women. You know how Republicans always say we shouldn’t enact new programs without making sure they’re paid […]
President Truman ordered the integration of the military in 1948. It didn’t happen overnight, but by 1953 and the end of the Korean War it was reality. My dad was Air Force and I grew up going to integrated DoD schools in Germany. My one exposure to official segregation came when we rotated back Stateside […]
Aerial refueling: also called air-to-air refueling and in-flight refueling. You can’t send a B-2 from Missouri to hit a high-priority ISIS target in Libya without it; nor can you deploy an expeditionary air wing to a combat zone in Afghanistan or the Middle East. Aerial refueling allows receiving aircraft to fly long distances or stay on station […]
A few years ago I wrote a short post about the B-36 Peacemaker bomber. Here’s an excerpt: … even though I was around during the B-36 bomber’s heyday I never saw one in flight. It’s not something you’d forget: it would have been akin to seeing the Hindenburg or a tidal wave. They say the ground shook […]