Let's Get Ready To Rumble

THIS is a huge development in the fight to keep the Air Transport Association from taking defacto control of future air travel and our skies. It is now formally a battle between the dinosaurs and mammals.

Will the entrenched Airline/Airport/Bureaucracy Bloc be able to stem the free market tide and prevent disruptive technology from changing air travel, or will they be forced to adapt or die?

Should be interesting to follow the PR battles.

I'm betting on the most agile in the long run: be they among the most evolved dinosaurs or the strongest mammals.

Bloomberg was a Republican?

Who knew?

Better yet: who cares?

Happy Father's Day Dad

A Pic of My Dad (on the left) in 1958. This is one of the prototype (YH-40 #7) Iroquois "Hueys" on a layover at Bell Helicopter coming back from desert testing and on the way back to Fort Rucker. Dad flew on a lot of the exotic Army helos of the 'nifty-fifties', including all of the Huey prototypes, the U.S.'s first (a Boeing or Lockheed bird-I can't find the pic right now)[Correction 10/25/09- finally found the pic. it was a (should'a known)Sikorsky YH-39] and first U.S. production turbine helicopters (Kaman), and he even survived a hairy in-flight emergency on a prototype Cessna helicopter (I know, I had never heard of one either until he told me about it).

At the time of the photo, he was an 'old' Spec 2, having already done a hitch as a Navy 'plane captain' on PB-4Y anti-submarine warfare aircraft (a flying job in those days) over the Gulf of Mexico during the Korean War (looking for Russkie diesel subs, I guess-kidding! Corpus Christie was a training base) .

About two years after this photo Dad would be out of the Army (Spec 5 pay didn't cover the necessities of a family of 6-going-to-7) and shortly thereafter he would start a career as a "go-to" Tech Rep for Lycoming Gas Turbines: travelling the globe to keep food on the table for what would eventually become a family of eight. His travels included spending most of 1965-eve of '69 (my formative teen years) in Vietnam. He was home most of the time between 69-72 straightening me out. I'm sure his thumbprint is still on my back... and Thank God it is because Heaven knows I needed it.

I remember first seeing this picture a few years ago - right after my Dad passed away. As the oldest of six kids my mind's eye view of my parents is as they were when they were younger and this photo best captures how I will always remember Dad. He had two natural stances his whole life: this one and "Parade Rest".

I didn't think much about the other gentlemen in the photo until my Mom casually mentioned a month or so ago that Dad sure 'loved flying with that pilot'. Well, that got my attention fast. Dad was not too generous with praise when it came to pilots and there were very few he would ever say he 'loved' flying with, so I tried to find out more about the CWO pilot on the right.

The pilot's name is Cliff Turvey, and it was easy enough to find information about him. He was the Army Aviator of the Year in 1959 and was awarded the DFC for some of his flying on the Huey Test Program. He retired as a Major. I made contact with one of his sons, who wrote to tell me Maj. Turvey did one tour of Vietnam and was awarded a second DFC to boot. Like a lot of military pilots, after he retired, he never flew again.

I wonder now if Dad ran into him 'in-country'. I know, I know -- it was a big place and there were a lot of Helo pilots. But there were very few Lycoming Tech Reps, and Dad actually ran into a lot of guys from his early days in the Army. He was based out of wherever the biggest number of helos might be found, so he was usually living in a tent with the (and became "beloved" to him) First Air Cav, but travelled anywhere a helo powertrain might need some TLC.

IMHO, these guys are the 'original' Air Assault Troopers.

Again,

Happy Father's Day Dad!
(updated 7/19/07 to correct some poor sentence structure and clarify some points)

An Open Letter to Trent Lott

Senator Lott,

Caught your statements today on the Senate floor regarding the "Amnesty" bill.

You obviously care more about the harmony of your little "Club Senate" than perpetuating the Civilization that IS these United States.

I will be contributing to the election campaigns of only two Republicans for certain next time around. The beneficiaries will be John Cornyn and whoever runs against you in the primaries.

I will not be alone.

That is all.

Windmill Advocates Tilting at Critics

AKA Bird Cuisinarts Part II (Part 1 Here)

Hat Tip: Instapundit

The numbers below, attributed to the National Research Council have been presented as representing the breakdown of major ‘anthropogenic causes’ of bird deaths, are now flying (no pun intended) around the World Wide Web:

Domestic cats: Hundreds of millions a year
Striking high-tension lines: 130 million - 1 billion a year
Striking buildings: 97 million to 976 million a year
Cars: 80 million a year
Toxic chemicals: 72 million
Striking communications towers: 4 to 50 million a year
Wind turbines: 20,000 to 37,000

How unfortunate.

Unfortunate, because at first look these numbers could be nothing more than, in a word, “crap”. It is particularly unfortunate because to realize they are crap, all one has to do is to simply cogitate for a moment on the numbers as they are presented:

Doesn’t the first number (‘Domestic Cats’) appear particularly vague to the reader? It looks very much like “somebody’s” obvious WAG (Wild A** Guess). Think about it. The expression used represents any number between 200,000,000 and 999,999,999 dead birds. Isn’t that a little ‘broad’ of a number to have come from any meaningful and conclusive research?

About the second, third, and sixth (Striking High-Tension Lines, Buildings, and Communications Towers) numbers : see anything perplexing about the ranges offered? Exactly what should one conclude about any estimate that spans an entire order of magnitude? Think about it - there is enough uncertainty in the numbers provided to consider the very high probability that whoever gathered this ‘information’ didn’t have enough data to actually determine the real numbers. Heck, they couldn’t even determine the scale of the deaths due to these causes.

The fourth ‘cause’ listed is suspect given the weapon (Cars) and the geographical size of the ‘crime scene’ (Roads). Accepting the 80 Million number as a convenient ‘round-off’, how was the data collected and estimate formed? There’s an awfully lot of cars to follow, with thousands and thousands of miles of roads cutting through untold numbers of different ecosystems and bird populations to factor into any estimate. Full Disclosure: I admit I may have been a little more skeptical than some concerning this number, due to my exposure to my Grandfather’s stirring tales of observing and auditing game bird population survey lunacies in Jackson County, Oregon.

Toxic Chemicals. Hmmph.
Nice number. 72 million. Not 70, not 75. Seventy Two.

Fairly specific for a causality :

1. that doesn’t always kill at the point of exposure,
2. with a victim that for what must be an overwhelmingly large, yet unquantifiable percentage of the time probably isn’t even found or subject to a post mortem,
3. with a verifiable sample population that has the cause of death assessed by someone who might be in their line of work due to their inspiration by Rachael Carlson. (my personal skepticism coming out here)

There's not enough evidence to throw out this number without further review by a long-shot I know, but it is definitely a number I would want to investigate before I accepted it much less repeated.

Wind Turbines. A realistic ‘appearing’ range anyway, but from my anecdotal experience it seems..ahem… low. Also given the ‘study’ purpose, might the research have just a 'slight' windmill bias?

Don’t Take My Word For It -- Take the Source's Word For It.
Well I know these numbers are crap, and normally I wouldn’t even bother to investigate how the crap was created in the first place. I would just take the position that if someone else thought I was wrong, then they could go try and prove it. But this information was easy enough get: it comes from the ‘study’ that provided it in the first place. From Pages 50 and 51:


The authors immediately after this admission attempt to make a case that the numbers are still meaningful, but their logic is severely undercut by their own later descriptions of what they see as needed for future research and by what is in their summary at the end. Also, if anyone bothers to read this report/study they should note the authors devote a lot of attention to the far less cute but no less threatened bats. For some reason, there is not just the same outcry over that equally important part of the ecosystem.

So, why don’t we just build us some nice clean nuclear power plants, instead of clogging up our landscapes and seascapes with these ugly windmills, hmmmm?

On a personal note:
1. I’m still waiting for somebody to do an in-depth analysis of the Wind Energy industry’s waste stream.
2. It chaps my cheeks to be on the same side as Teddy Kennedy on any subject, even if he’s on the right side for the wrong reasons.

Associated Press Smearing the Military

Willful Sloppiness: Is That Anything Like Reckless Disregard?

AP Story Lead: “Military veterans in prison are more than twice as likely to have been convicted for sex offenses as nonveteran inmates, federal researchers say. They cannot say why.”

I found this AP article via James Taranto at “Best of the Web Today”. He is all over the study’s so-called ‘findings’ already (eighth item) and it is worth the trip just to read his debunking.

I think he was actually being kind, because he probably could have gone further in his critique. I base this observation on what the reader will find buried towards the end of the original article:

The study found that veterans in prison were older, more educated, more likely to have been married and more likely than nonveterans to be incarcerated for violent crimes or offenses against women or children.

Many of those findings can be explained simply by age demographics, Colby College sociologist Alec Campbell said.

Crime tends to decrease with age so older inmates are more likely serving lengthy sentences. Veterans as a group are older than the general population, so Campbell said it is not surprising to see a higher percentage of veterans imprisoned for violent crimes, which carry longer prison sentences.

Ahem…..
How many of these incarcerated ‘older’ veterans became veterans courtesy of their local draft board?

It seems to me that if one tries to establish differences between the character of veteran and non-veteran populations, one should also establish whether or not there are differences between those who are in one population by choice and those who are compelled to be in the same population only through the force of law.

A quote from Taranto helps to perform a further analysis:

What's more, it's very easy to make the sex-crime disparity vanish.

The sex-crime incarceration rate for veterans is 23% of 630 per 100,000, or 145 per 100,000. The sex-crime incarceration rate for nonveterans is 9% of 1,390 per 100,000, or 125 per 100,000. The veteran rate is only 16% higher than the nonveteran rate.

Thus, if just 20 of those 145 per 100,000 veterans (under 14% of the incarcerated Vets) were draftees, ALL differences between the two groups would disappear.

From what we see in the article, and without further detailed analysis of the prison population, the Vet/NonVet categorization and ‘disparity’ is no more relevant than categorization by eye color.

However, I suspect a more detailed analysis would reveal a story that might never get reported in today’s environment – that those who have served in today’s modern all-volunteer force trend towards much lower percentages for all types of offenders in the prison population – ESPECIALLY if you filter for fraudulent enlistments by bad actors who get past the system (hopefully not as bad a problem today as in my day).

Sloppy by Design

Taranto closes his piece with:

Probably the AP was just being sloppy, but the result was to smear Americans who have served their country in uniform.

As it appears to me, that much sloppiness in one place can only occur as part of a willful act.
The AP didn’t even care to think about the meaningfulness (or meaninglessness) of the data – It was:

1. a headline they wanted,
2. on a subject they wanted to publish, and
3. wanted to publish from a certain angle.

The proof is in how the title: "Study: Imprisoned Military Vets More Likely to Have Sex Crime Convictions Than Others" contrasts with the complete and total of quotes from an author of the study in the article:

"We couldn't come to any definite conclusion as to why,"

"I don't want people to come away from this thinking veterans are crazed sex offenders.

"I want them to understand that veterans are less likely to be in prison in the first place."

IMHO the AP owes veterans yet another apology

Q: Why Stealth? A: IADS & SAM Traps

Exhibit A

Defense Tech has a great new post up with a video clip showing a SAM Trap back during the Desert Storm days.

Life is far more pleasant when it is hard for your enemy to find you and see you.

JASSM: Son of TSSAM

Dang it! TSSAM is still getting me in hot water.

I'm going to catch heck from my fellow TSSAM Alums for mistyping TSSAM as TASSM over at Defense Tech . My bad, but I claim extenuating circumstances of fatigue and phonetics: We used to pronounce the acronym as either "T-Sam" or "TAZ'em".

By way of amends, and as a partial explanation, here's some rarely seen (but not rarest) TSSAM patches, and I throw myself at the mercy of the TSSAMers.

(Note to the general public: Trust me, that is all one can do. Flight/Weapons Testers eat their young.)

Kettering & Logic vs. Goldberg & Kitsch

"Breath of the Beast" has a great post up - a little bit of history with a lot of common sense.

We Win They Lose

What a great concept!

Now, where else did I see this strategy recently? Hmmmm....Oh Yeah - Here

Godspeed, Robert Rosenthal

"Robert Rosenthal, a World War II bomber pilot who twice survived being shot down in raids over Europe and later served on the U.S. legal team that prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, has died at age 89."

Deep in the Obituary:

"A human being has to look out for other human beings or there's no civilization..."

Rest in Peace Sir. A lot of people still feel that way.

"Turks Protest Islamic-Rooted Government"

Things are looking up in Turkey, and the press seems to be starting to get the story straight for a change:

"We don't want a covered woman in Ataturk's presidential palace," said Ayse Bari, a 67-year-old housewife. "We want civilized, modern people there."

A few good pics at the link, and the reason I wrote 'seems' above, is that in the handful of pictures at the link, someone saw fit to include a couple of pics protesting the US in Iraq from an earlier protest. This reflects either some sort of attempt at 'balance' or more likely very poor keyword discipline combined with an automated gallery building routine. I lean toward believing it is the latter, since that would imply incompetence vs. evil.

Air Force Readiness? (AF Reshaping BS Point of Interest)

I REALLY AM still trying to close out the AF Reshaping BS series -- Honest!

The hard part is getting the answer nobody wants to hear into a form that somebody will at least attempt to read. IN the meantime, I just found a piece about how AF readiness is down at www.noangst.blogspot.com (could not get link to work for some reason, but the link is still the title of this post if you want to try it).
I intend to start visiting there regularly myself.

Enjoy.

BTW: Here's a hint on where I'm going with this series. I had a discussion with an awfully darned smart O-6 yesterday, and we agreed:

The problem is rooted in trying to do a Superpower's job on less than a Superpower Sidekick budget.

3.9% (or less) of GDP (Source: slide 25) for defense and that's WITH a war on? Gimme a break!

Very Large Secularist Protests in Turkey

200,000 people. The numbers are way up from last month’s event and it was a very cold day.

Encouraging! Maybe there ARE more Ataturks out there.

Of course, the BBC reported last month’s 80,000 strong protest as being one ‘against government reform’ and buried the lede in the closing paragraphs:

“The current government is led by a party with its roots in Islamic politics while the civil service is one of the guardians of Turkey's secular status.

Critics of the decentralisation plan believe that allowing local government greater flexibility over the hiring and firing of civil servants could open the civil service to religious influence.”

(I think there may be a special section in Hell for BBC apparatchiks.)

SMSgt Mac to Turkish General: Take a Deep Breath

Seal Your Borders as Best you Can...Stay Where You Are...And Shut Up!
Globalsecurity.org relays a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article reporting that Turkey’s “top General’ is calling for a cross-border operation against the Kurds. The article notes:

“Turkey has repeatedly urged the Iraqi government and U.S. forces in Iraq to crack down on thousands of rebels from the outlawed separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who use northern Iraq to launch attacks inside Turkey”

As ye sow, so shall ye reap...
If Turkey couldn’t find its way to let the 4th ID open up a Northern Front in the last march on Baghdad, thus causing us innumerable (and thank goodness not insurmountable) difficulties, What makes the good general think anyone should care about how the outcome of this war is now causing them problems?

I should note I have a generally favorable opinion of the Turks, and hold their military’s historical warrior ethos in high regard. I am a great admirer of Mustafa Kemal’s efforts (not all his methods and objectives obviously) to bring Turkey out of the dark ages, and of his military and political acumen that allowed Turkey to survive and thrive post WW1. But ever since Iraqi Freedom, I’ve concluded that there just aren’t any "Ataturks" in Turkey anymore.

Go to Michael Totten’s archives (March and April) for series of posts that are an outstanding introduction to the Kurds and Kurdistan. (Maybe the Turkish General really just wants to stop that new shopping mall!)