Monthly Archives: February 2007

Those lovable Iranians

They are incensed–incensed!–at perceived injustice, wherever they find it in the world, particularly if it’s outside of Iran and in Texas–in this case right up the road from the Rancho in a little town called Taylor.

"There is a prison camp in Taylor, Texas named Hutto Residential Center [actually, the T. Don Hutto Residential Center]. It opened in May of last year. It has hundreds of children from six months old and up with their moms imprisoned there — in cells, 22 hours a day, prison uniforms, behind razor wire walls — for profit by a private prison company called Correctional Corporation of America (CCA)."

This is a holding facility for some of the hordes of illegal immigrants from Mexico who are flowing across the U.S.-Mexico border at the rate of about 1 million a year–presumably accompanied by lots of Iranians bent on mischief. The ACLU (who else?) got into the act Friday, telling the Austin daily they will investigate alleged violations of human rights at the facility. The heinous "for profit," bit apparently scars the souls of socialists everywhere, but is increasingly common in the USA as a means of keeping taxes low. Not that I believe that the Iranians or anyone else are more humane, you understand. Quite the contrary.

Via Simply Jews 

Sea Knight shootdown

Very jerky al Q video (with, oddly, a singing chorus) of the missile shootdown of the CH-46 Sea Knight over Iraq this past Wednesday, Feb. 7. The crew and passengers obviously had plenty of time to realize what was happening before the helicopter was engulfed in flames and crashed. Freelance embed Bill Roggio, a former Army officer with signal and infantry experience, says his sources say it could have been a Russian-made Strela 3 shoulder-fired missile provided by Iran. If so, how long will we let this go on?

Saturn views

Good views of Saturn possible this weekend with a home telescope, two hours after sunset in the Northern Hemisphere, looking east here until it’s overhead by midnight. Should have a good view of the rings as they are tilting towards us.

From SpaceWeather.com: "Saturn is at its closest to Earth: 762 million miles. It thus looks bigger and brighter both to the naked eye [resembling a bright, yellow star] and through a telescope than it will at any other time in 2007."

Iran, again

The 26 Americans killed in five helicopter shootdowns in Iraq since Jan. 20 were the latest casualties in our unheralded war with Iran inside Iraq, according to Bill Roggio’s intelligence sources. The action the Democrats in Congress seem determined to keep from becoming obvious with a strike against Iran itself. But it’s another underscoring of the fact that until we take the fight to Tehran and Damascus, no amount of Baghdad neighborhood scouring is going to work for long.

Shameless political promotion

Akaky, he of (as he puts it) the Vampire State, has raised another $5.75 for his pursuit of the Democrat presidential nomination, after he crosses the street to redeem the bottles at the grocery. But the MSM is still ignoring him and Daily Kos hasn’t even taken to sneering at his conservative views and demanding that he, like Joe Lieberman, be run out of the party. So he’s taken to slyly including the name of former Playmate Roberta Vasquez in his political posts, a naked (as it were) attempt to raise his hit count. That’s because he had previously noticed that his mentions of her had drawn an inordinate large number of search engine visitors.

A surfeit of astronauts

The story behind the story of astronaut Lisa Nowak’s cross-country odyssey of love gone wrong isn’t just NASA’s problem of psychological evaluation of future crews for the space station, moon base or Mars exploration, i.e. what if this had happened in space? It’s a hidden one of the space agency’s recruiting too many astronauts in the first place. They’ve created a surplus of high achievers chasing too few flights. Not to mention the problem of what to do with them after the peak experience they’ve been aiming at for so long is suddenly over? Nowak waited a decade before finally getting into low orbit last summer. Her chances of flying again before another decade passed were poor even before her escapade made them nonexistent.

UPDATE Nowak has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder. 

Bessie Coleman

For Black History Month, Miriam at Miriam’s Ideas comes up with a thoughtful look at the first licensed African-American pilot, Bessie Coleman, a Texas native who barnstormed across the state.

"Every Memorial Day, black men and women aviators fly in formation over the grave of Bessie Coleman, dropping bouquests of flowers on the grave of the first black woman ever to earn a pilot’s license."

The manner of Coleman’s premature death is a reminder of how much things have changed since the open-cockpit, wooden spar and wire-and-cloth days of the 1920s.

UPDATE  Transcript of good 2002 Voice of America feature on Coleman. And this longer, very detailed feature about her flying in Lockheed-Martin’s quarterly magazine Code One.