Author: Dave

I am a big Airplane fan (career as well as musical interest). So I was listening to some of what is available on the various video stores and came upon this “Crown of Creation” version from 1968. It is really good. It is done live not lip synched. So I’m listening to the words. And…

Little Green Footballs put up this excellent video of the US Marines Silent Drill Team. The silent part means that no commands are given to initiate various actions as is done in normal squad manuvers. Commands like “About Face”, “Forward, March”, “Attention”, “Present Arms”, etc. Which of course got me to thinking about my days…

Mark of Ask Mark reports that because of Dr Bussard‘s winning the Outstanding Technology of the Year Award for 2006 and his widely reported Google talk the US Navy has decided to fund the final year of the his contract. (I contacted my Congress critter with no obvious result. However, maybe others had better results.)…

Commenter linearthinker of Random Traverse just gave me a heads up about free down loads of Stopping Power [pdf] by J. Neil Schulman. It is about 900K. You can read more about J. Neil’s horrible birthday (16 April) and why he decided to make his book free at Free Republic. Cross Posted at Power and…

Yesterday the Reuters spin on the Virginia Tech story was too many guns In The Wrong Hands. Today the spin is different. Not enough guns in the right hands: Advocates of gun ownership rights saw Monday’s massacre as evidence of the need to relax gun laws rather than tighten them. “All the school shootings that…

I’m sure by now you have heard about the Virginia Tech shootings. So of course we have the usual: “We live in a society where guns are pretty well accepted,” said Jim Sollo, of Virginians Against Handgun Violence. “There are 200 million guns in this society and obviously some in the wrong hands.” Actually what…

A bunch of us have been working on understanding the physics of the Bussard Fusion Reactor. The subject of getting a copy of Mathematica has come up several times. What is detering us is the cost. Since I have several students in school and know several teachers from grade school to college level I may…

This post at Classical Values got me to thinking about: what are the standards we should adhere to these days? Hillary Clinton had a fund raiser hosted by rapper Timbaland to wind up her March 31st Money grub. No wonder she blasted Imus. Translation: how are we to know at whom and when to be…

Bill has some new posts up here and here on critical thinking. I’m just starting to read them myself. Bill is always excellent so go read them yourself. H/T Transterrestrial Musings Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

Kate Coble of Just Another Pretty Farce has written about her experiences with a “head hunter” company by the name of J. L. Kirk & Associates, or Kirk Associates, or JL Kirk, or JLK, or JLK-A, or sometimes just “Kirk”. Bob Krumm came up with all those Kirk names in another delightful and witty post…

I want to focus here on the war in Iraq and the application of standard American military strategy to the fighting in Iraq. I want to do this based on the lessons learned from the Vietnam War. It seems to me the mistakes we are making in Iraq are similar to the mistakes we made…

Asia News has a story about Muslim threats against the Dali Lama. Lumbini (AsiaNews) – Nepal’s three million Buddhists are alarmed over death threats made against the Dalai Lama, allegedly by Islamic extremist group Lashkar-e-Toiba. In Lumbini, Buddha’s birth place in southern Nepal, monks and lay people are praying for him. A local monk, Bhante…

While I was away (moving) the last week and a half, I have not been idle. I have been reading On Strategyby Colonel of Infantry Harry G. Summers, Jr. and Strategyby B. H. L. Hart. Two classics in the field of military strategy. Col. Summers’ book deals with the Vietnam War and Basil Hart’s book…

This Is Zimbabwe has the latest news coming out of Zimbabwe. Like this story Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is 34 years for women and 37 years for men. I would really like you to think about that for a moment. How old are you? How much longer would that leave you to live or have…

It is not safe to be a lesbian in Palestine. Many of the attendees said they were sad that the only place safe enough to hold a conference for gay Arab women was in a Jewish area of Haifa, which has a mixed Arab-Jewish population. How is that for irony? I got the link from…

Phone hackers morph into computer hackers. Steve Wozniack is featured. I never got into phone hacking (I did work on Motorola’s first Electronic Moblie Exchange [EMX] where I learned a lot about tone switching. I was writing a section of the manuals.). However, when the Altair hit the cover of Popular Electronics in January of…

How the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started in 2 1/4 minutes.

Michael Ledeen has a few complaints about American Diplomats. What I would like to do is suggest a remedy. They really need to read some Retief novels. Our military reads Starship Troopers and used to read the Dorsai Novels. The official reading list. Evidently it changes from time to time. Maybe Foggy Bottom needs a…

The Washington Post reports: Iran Feels Pinch As Major Banks Curtail Business. More than 40 major international banks and financial institutions have either cut off or cut back business with the Iranian government or private sector as a result of a quiet campaign launched by the Treasury and State departments last September, according to Treasury…

It’s Vietnam Time again. The House of Representatives has passed a Cut and Run Bill disguised as a Support the Troops Bill. How clever. However, we have a lot of clever citizens in America. One of them has something very useful to say. We must stop this “Hate George Bush” war at any cost. It…