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Via my ma:
Some Ga. State students decided to conduct an experiment on I-285 recently by driving 4 abreast at 55 mph (the actual speed limit)….they had cameras in cars and on one overpass….see what happened…
A Meditation on the Speed Limit >> (Google video - requires Flash)
No, I wasn’t at this awesome airshow at Edwards AFB — but I certainly wish I had been. The highlight was, not surprisingly, the F22A Raptor demo, during which these pictures were taken. Includes some great caption/background/explanatory text.
The Venerable William F. Buckley expounds upon that nagging suspicion that’s been dancing around the periphery of my conscious thoughts this past week: It Didn’t Work. “It”, of course, is our intervention — experiment, even, depending on which columnists you read — in Iraq. Most notably, WFB notes that our course in Iraq was founded on two assumptions, two postulates; should either of them prove untrue, then “all bets are off.” It would seem that this is where we find ourselves.
Depressing in some ways, this concept. Frankly, “disturbing” is a more appropriate word. All the more so when compounded with the sheer staggering scale of Dubya’s 2nd Term screwups — the latest of which is, of course, the UAE ports deal. Unlike the popular hype, I don’t think the sky would indeed fall if such a deal were cut — but for sheer political reasons alone it should’ve gone permanently in the circular file. Consider the irony: the administration is assuring us that our ports would be just as secure as they currently are once we hand a large portion of the day-to-day ops to a Middle Eastern Arabic country …while the same administration can’t even secure our borders, can’t even prevent the daily tsunami of illegals across the very boundaries that delineate our country. All in all, not good politics — and at a time when Bush needs to do everything right, politics included.
Europe and the Middle East aren’t getting better. If we can’t hold the course, no one else will.
…will use a weapon you’ve probably never even heard of: an electromagnetic pulse.
Here’s a sample scenario. A frieghter, sailing under the flag of an African country (Sudan, maybe) is making its regular run to New York. Little attention is paid to it, although it does receive cursory notice from the intelligence agencies since its owner’s company has ties, albeit apparently remote ones, to Iranian contacts. When the freighter is about 100 miles out from New York, its crew begins their real mission: the launch of two ballistic missiles, crude by U.S. standards, but made famous during the 1991 Iraq war and known by their trade name as “Scuds”. In particular, these are Scud-Bs, remarkable only for their comparative cheapness and their (directly related) proliferation throughout the world. Scud-Bs have a range of around 180 miles, so New York is already well within the range of the Scuds on our hypothetical freighter — Washington DC might be as well, depending on exactly what route the freighter was on. But these missiles won’t ever touch the ground again. (more…)
Any country that seeks “peaceful” nuclear power and is completely self-sufficient in energy production is de facto suspect. Iran has enough natural gas to meet its clean electrical generation needs for centuries. The only possible rationale for its multi-billion-dollar program of building nuclear reactors, and spending billions more to hide and decentralize them, is to obtain weapons, and thus to gain clout and attention in a manner that otherwise is not warranted by either Iranian conventional forces, cultural influence, or economic achievement.
