Bullet Points:
** Are you tired?
** Has Arkancide reached Red China? Zero Hedge reported, “In just four months, four prominent Chinese entrepreneurs from multiple industries have committed suicide, all reportedly jumping from buildings in desperate final acts. Experts say that these incidents stand in stark contrast to the Chinese regime’s official narrative of better-than-expected GDP growth for the first half of the year.”
** The Soul Brothers of the Inner City don’t support the Butt Guy as Commander in Chief and Leader of the Free World. Imagine that.
** Bernie returns from rehab.
** Fox reported, “More Americans than ever are choosing not to drink alcohol, according to a new Gallup Poll. Only 54% of respondents to Gallup’s annual Consumption Habits survey conducted last month say they consume alcohol, which is the lowest on record in nearly 90 years.” Pres. Trump should give Nancy, Hillary, and Pocahontas Medals of Freedom for saving America’s wine industry.
** Flying, with MRSBRM. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.
**A Retraction – Okay, so I made a mistake in Tuesday’s or Wednesday’s blog last week about Zoltan Mamdani and his campaign to give the benighted voters of NYC what they are asking for, good and hard, and without lubrication. I mistakenly said that he was born in Ghana when, in fact, he was born in Uganda. In my defense, both of those names share many of the same letters. I’m not convinced that they are actual countries, and if they are, I’m guessing that they are very similar. I mean, it’s not like I said he was born in Switzerland when he was born in Uganda. Nobody is asking, “Is that a fine Ugandan timepiece you’re wearing on your wrist, as you savor that decadent Ugandan chocolate?” Remember when that Swiss leader ate that guy from a rival canton just a few short decades ago?
** Wetbacks won’t be washing your car today.
** Boating with EdB.
** Is trouble coming to Iraq? Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah Secretary General Abu Hussein al Hamidawi published a statement on August 15 in which he called for strengthening Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, likely in response to recent US efforts to weaken the Axis of Resistance. Hamidawi underlined the necessity of “supporting” Iranian-backed Iraqi militias with advanced weapons, enhanced technical capabilities, and improved “defensive and destructive capacities.” Will Iraq be able to de-nut the Iranian militia groups by itself, or will it need outside assistance? What about the Kurds? Oh, that’s right. The President of Iraq is a Kurd (required by statute). It can be a confusing part of the world.
** If you can afford beer, tattoos, drugs, manicured claws, and cigarettes, you don’t need food stamps or welfare.
Boeing=Outsourcing
One day in 1916, [Bill] Boeing spotted an imperfectly cut wing rib, dropped it to the floor, and slowly stomped it to bits. ‘I, for one, will close up shop rather than send out work of this kind,’ he declared.” Compare this anecdote to a much more recent tale: “When David Calhoun, the soon-to-be-lame-duck CEO of the company Boeing founded, made a rare appearance on the shop floor in Seattle one day this past January … he was not there to observe slipshod work before it found its way into the air—it already had. A few weeks earlier, the door of a Boeing 737 had fallen out mid-flight.
The two scenes tell us the peculiar story of a plane maker that, over 25 years, slowly but very deliberately extracted itself from the business of making planes. For nearly 40 years, the company built the 737 fuselage itself in the same plant that turned out its B-29 and B-52 bombers. In 2005, it sold this facility to a private investment firm, keeping the axle grease at arm’s length and notionally shifting risk, capital costs, and labor woes off its books onto its ‘supplier.’ ‘Offloading,’ Boeing called it. Meanwhile, the tail, landing gear, flight controls, and other essentials were outsourced to factories around the world owned by others, and shipped to Boeing for final assembly, turning the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits.
***
A Perspective – by Walter Kirn
I used to go into small towns, let’s say in the south or the Midwest, and I’d ask somebody, because I had pledged not to use technology to keep it to a minimum on the trip. And I would ask somebody in a gas station, “How do you get to the next town, 30 miles away?” And they would look at me blankly and say, “Don’t you have a phone?” And I’d say, “Well, yeah, it’s not working. How do you get there?” “Well, get your phone to work.” “Do I turn north going out of the driveway here, or south to get there?” “What are you talking about?” And I realized that there was no bird’s-eye view in the heads of the people who lived in this particular town. It might be, and often was, a town of 2,000. And I was talking about going to a city of 10,000, the place you’d think they’d go to shop or wherever, to the movies. And still there was no sense of how things fit together.
And I see that with turn-by-turn navigation, even when you do have your phone, people often get lost the moment they stray from the turn-by-turn navigation. They’re looking for guidance on the next move, but have no clear picture of their current position. And I think we’ve gotten that way socially and historically. We want to know what the next move is. What’s the next update? What’s the next instruction from on high? However, as to where it’s leading us and how far we are from where we set out, and whether or not we’re getting any closer to the places we thought we wanted to go, remains a mystery to many, and this is becoming increasingly true. The notion that we can escape the bounds of space, time, and the body, as well as personal history, genetics, and so on, is often described as Gnosticism.
Meaning what’s important about life is the intellect and the mind and the body and the world are themselves a kind of dark forest to be overcome, to be escaped, to be transcended. As though the physical world is only the first stage of a rocket launch, which you then separate from and go on to the next level of transcendental life. The problem is that we perceive the world through our bodies and interact with the physical world. We talk, we meet, we fight, we love, we do whatever. And none of that so far occurs in digital space, which is the new version, I guess, of the Empyrean. We sometimes talk about going through physical space, such as Mars or the moon. We’re going to build a nuclear plant there. But in my youth, that physical space—the cosmos—did represent the next stage. I didn’t suspect that it would be this internal virtual space that would take over.
Sea Story
(H/T US Naval Institute) VADM Gerald Bogan had a reputation for being demanding and pugnacious. When he was captain of USS Saratoga during WWII, he got drunk in a club in New Caledonia and dared anyone in the place to fight him. A gunner’s mate accepted the challenge and clobbered Bogan, knocking him out. The next day, the gunner’s mate was ordered to report to the captain’s cabin.
Bogan asked, “Are you the man who knocked me cold last night?”
“Yes, Captain, I am,” replied the gunner’s mate.
Bogan then advanced the man to chief petty officer, saying, “Well, Chief, that was a damn good right.”
Would that happen today? No. I’m afraid those times have passed, and I can’t say that things have improved because of the march of time. Entropy has done us no favors.
Identify the Aircraft
1
2
3
Only one was built.
4
5
You’ll need a hint: Made in Arizona – a two-person aircraft prototype made by a division of AiResearch Manufacturing Co. for the United States Marine Corps.
End
1 Rockwell OV-10 Bronco
2
3 is Convair XF-92
4 is Ilyushin Il-96
5 Garrett STAMP
#1 – No, and not an OV-10 prototype, good on 3-5.
2 is Grumman OV-1 Mohawk with vehicle radar
yes
Identify the Aircraft:
1. Convair Model 48 Charger
2. Grumman OV-1D Mohawk
3. Convair XF-92
4. Ilyushin Il-96
5. Garrett STAMP
Exactly
You chances of being shot down by an OV-1 are low but never zero:
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https://avgeekery.com/avgeekery-exclusive-mig-killing-army-ov-1-mohawk-pilot-ken-lee/
WOW!
“If you can afford beer, tattoos, drugs, manicured claws, and cigarettes, you don’t need food stamps or welfare.” Quite.
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Tired? Oh my. Don’t forget the dreadlocks and cornrows. Wife and I occasionally encounter the lone artificial one on a sidewalk or in a parking lot, obviously having detached from its owner. One of us will point and say, “Look, there’s $20.”.
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Without fail, the black folks we meet who are of our generation are some to the most down to earth, welcoming people you could hope for. You can joke back and forth with them and everyone LOL’s.
What you say about people who are black of your generation is… we call them ‘people who are black.’ It’s just a descriptor. They’re just like us.
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Then there are black people. Sigh. The ‘I’ma victim’ and ‘Everything’s Raycist’ and ‘We wuz kangs and shit’ people. Yeah.
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As to the “Afford” concept, I see it in my apartment complex. The wonderful smell of alcohol and weed. The piece of crap vehicles with a $5k stereo system and $10k wheels. Loud music and gaming with the bass turned to max. Sneery negative reaction when greeted with “Good morning” or “Good evening” or even “Hello.” Screaming arguments 24/7, throwing garbage, destroying apartments (the apartment on the right side of mine had a flood, for a year, apparently before it got so bad it leaked into my apartment. The one on the left has had to be completely rebuilt, cabinets, bathtubs, sinks, drywall, twice in 5 years. Not money making apartments at all.) Police showing up at strange times in response to screaming arguments and obvious physical damage yet no arrests or “You need to go away and cool down” warnings.
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And this is a relatively quiet complex. The ‘Ghetto’ behavior is growing increasingly in our faces. Admittedly I haven’t had to peep out the peephole while holding a pistol or shotgun (in ready-to-go mode, I love grip safety pistols!) in a while. But the daily pong of stanky-ass-weed is getting very annoying. I can’t open my door or leave a window open without being assaulted nasally by the stench.
I recall the days when you could get a felony conviction for one single marijuana seed in possession – a couple of years on prison. That ship sailed.
“Remember when that Swiss leader ate that guy from a rival canton just a few short decades ago?”
Glad I swallowed my coffee before I read that!
The Walter Kirn piece is interesting.
As a society, our heritage has been dismantled, one statue, one military base, at a time.
I can’t give attribution, but I’ve been told that a nation that lose it’s history is like a man that loses his memory.
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That nation becomes unanchored.
I think it might be worthwhile to send a survey (prepaid return envelope) out to 1000 highschool American history teachers nationwide (only one per school) with the following question:
the two most important figures in American history and a 25-100 word essay about each explaining why (the lower number is there not so much for time limitations).
I get depressed watching Johnny on Waters Primetime, interview high school students about history. They all think Germany won the civil war.
France invaded Mexico in 1861 during the Civil War, hoping to replace negro slave-harvested US cotton (politically incorrect) with indian slave harvested cotton (correct) and propped Maximillian on the taco throne.
And the Mexicans have been crowing about beating 65 Legionnaires with only 3,000 proto-wetbacks ever since.
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Seriously, it took how long to overwhelm 65 people? And you as a nation are proud of it? No wonder we, the US of A, won bigly in the Mexican-American War. Even though we had fewer soldiers and were on the long end of a bad logistics train.
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F’n losers!
Cinco-de-Mayo isn’t celebrated in Mexico. It is among some people in the US as an excuse for a party – because there can’t be too many tacos.
Boeing’s downfall was when beancounters got control from the engineers. That began the ‘outsourcing’… sigh…
A retired Boeing engineer did contract work for us when we needed a licensed P.E. Interesting man, first worked on the B-47 and ended his career on the 757. Slide rule to cad-cam. This was around 1984 and the bean counters were already infesting engineering decisions. He said then the company was losing the culture that was the real strength of the company. He was happy to be retired.
I worked for Boeing from 1997-2001. Not the airplane business area, but the former NA-Rockwell plant in Anaheim. At one point, a new CFO was hired and we heard (through the engineering grapevine) that she was given a tour of each of the airplane production lines. At each line, she asked the production manager how much each plane cost to produce. Staggeringly, none of them could give her a definitive answer. She then asked how they knew how to price the plane. Again, no definitive answer. Of course, Boeing has massive marketing teams, and massive sales teams for each product line, and those folks probably have never spoken to an engineer either. I think the Dilbert comic is more accurate about that than most business school curricula.
This experience is indicative of a more MBA approach than engineering, but every time I worked in manufacturing, every lead engineer could answer those questions. Getting the US manufacturers back into shape will require changing this as well.
I think that the plant you’re referring to in Anaheim was Autonetics (at least at one point). The journey from North American Aviation to Rockwell International was an interesting one. Whenever government involves itself in manufacturing, the overhead required to satisfy government requirements drives the cost (everything from toilet seats to hammers to the SINS at Autonetics) through the roof.
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At the same time, there has been some remarkable work done (where science becomes magic). I don’t know what will come of the Golden Dome system. We weren’t ready to build something like that during the Reagan Presidency but I think that we have enough components on the shelf that it won’t take that much more to complete – something that works. We already have THAAD.
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Your comment brought Autonetics to mind. The primary developers of the ship’s inertial navigation system (SINS) were the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (later the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory) and the Autonetics Division of North American Aviation, with significant contributions from the Sperry Gyroscope Corporation. Dr. Charles Stark Draper, often referred to as the “father of inertial navigation,” led the MIT effort. The Sperry Corporation, known for gyrocompass technology, partnered with the MIT lab to develop and implement the SINS system.
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SINS kept and (as far as I know) still keeps every fleet ballistic missile “pointed” to their targets no matter where the submarine may go without additional corrections necessary.
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Today they’re the Trident II (D5) series, built and upgraded by Lockheed Martin for the U.S. Navy. It’s currently deployed on Ohio-class submarines and will also be used on the upcoming Columbia-class submarines. The D5 missile, including the D5LE (Life Extension) version, is the backbone of the nation’s sea-based strategic deterrence. Lockheed Martin is constructing a new facility in Titusville, Florida, to manufacture components for the D5LE2 missile, thereby expanding its production capabilities.
Right you are, Larry. When I hired on in 1997, they were still turning out lots of compact INS units, although the Autonetics moniker was dropped in the 80s, I believe. Other things that had been done on the campus included final I&T of the early block of GPS satellites. AFAIK each one underwent vibe testing for launch profiles. The shake tables were still around in one building and they looked operable.
By the time I left in 2001, Boeing had started to demobilize the whole campus. A couple of buildings had to be demolished due to damage incurred during the 1994 quake, and they basically kept it going until the current contracts ended that were using the last of the special facilities. During 1999 and 2000 they were already razing buildings and bringing in new tilt-ups for new occupancy. The end of an era.
Low approach on short final, island side, TFFJ, St Barthélemy. The compromises you get up to, trying to put a full airport on a very small and pointy island…
Not a crash. Just looks like one… and I sure wouldn’t be comfortable flying low enough to get ground effect on low approach. I mean, not that I haven’t done that, but the people and the vehicles would freak me out.
Before seeing that video, I thought the approach to Lindbergh
was steep and abrupt.
– Kle.
The approach to Lindberg is still steep and abrupt…
Anyone who puts themselves, on the ground, in that approach path is already a Darwin Award candidate.
There are all sorts of “fun” places to land in the Caribbean and Central America. I have been to a few as a former C-130 pilot.
Boeing…just couldn’t stick to their core business when the MBA’s and “SpehShall people decided they knew better how to build airplanes. (Incidentally, same goes for the Big 3 automakers…EV’s…pfft, pfft. Bunch of self-congratulatory dufuses in Armani.)
***
That Landing: When passersby can count the bugs and scratch marks on the bottom you know it’s tight. Well done pilot.