Captioned Title

(For those of you who weren’t in the Navy)

 

Bullet Points:

** America’s urban woes aren’t limited to the West Coast, of course. But the decline there has generally been steeper than elsewhere. Why? How did such golden cities get so tarnished, so quickly? Unlike in the tragic case of the Midwest, the answer is not reliance on declining industries: tech, space, and entertainment continue to show promise and could propel growth for decades. Instead, the damage has been remarkably self-inflicted, reflecting the reckless growth of a set of progressive dogmas, tough on police and permissive toward criminals and vagrants while imposing ever more burdens on what is left of the middle class.

** Triton – Triton is big. It’s the seventh-largest moon in the solar system, and it’s over 200 times bigger than all of the other moons of Neptune combined, which makes it really stick out. It orbits backward relative to Neptune’s spin, and its orbit is inclined at a stunning 67 degrees — almost perpendicular to its parent planet. Despite its irregularity, Triton’s orbit is surprisingly circular — in fact, one of the most perfectly circular orbits out of all the objects in the solar system.

 

Elysium (2013 Film)

In 2154, Earth is experiencing ecocide, it is overpopulated, diseased, and polluted. The planet’s citizens live in poverty and speak Spanish while the rich and powerful live on Elysium speaking French (and a smattering of English), on an orbiting space station just outside of Earth’s atmosphere.

It’s a type of liberal elite wet dream where they can be separated from the great unwashed and at the same time utilize all of that human capital as labor.

The elite’s lack of ruthlessness in dealing with the Earthbound leads to trouble for them. It’s not a great film, but you know that the coastal elites are ready to abandon the mess that they made and live up there. It will work out for them if there are enough mindless and willing slaves. Once the slaves wear out, they render out their protein to feed other slaves. The model has a certain symmetry to it. The slaves must be disarmed and they weren’t in the film…oops.

 

Book

 

IS-122, the early (1943) version of the famous Soviet IS-2 heavy tank. This used the KV-13 tank chassis. They made a lot of IS-2s, not many IS-122s, so they can be tough to ID.

KV-7 prototype assault gun, armed with the U-13 gun system which mounted an F-34 76mm gun between two 45mm guns.

LTJG Edmund D. Wright, USNR, (left) showing off the nose art he painted for B-29 Superfortress “Jackpot” to Army Air Corps corporals Eugene H. Rees (center) and Marion V. Lewis, at Tinian, 1944-45.

 

Identify the Aircraft

1

2

 

Identify the Tank

 

Identify the Tank Destroyer

 

Identify the Armored Car

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

26 COMMENTS

  2. Identify the Aircraft:
    1. Kalinin K-7
    2. Sikorsky CH-37 Mojave

    Identify the Tank:
    Type 97 Te-Ke tankette

    Identify the Tank Destroyer:
    Russian SU-101

    Identity the Armored Car:
    Russian BA-10

  4. Nose Art art meant to maintain some level of morale while being tongue in cheek in your face. LTJG Wright and the men of that era didn’t take themselves too seriously in such matters. Same with woman, who were more mature and would laugh knowing the point of the art. Today he’d be trashed on social MeTooMedia. Y the weak-minded self-absorbed ninny’s who never had to support a war effort except to proudly wear their Ukraine lapel pin while ordering their soy mochachino latte’.

      • Yup…we live in a juvenile era of useful drones. The Aware look at it and shake our heads.

        Off to the salt mines for me, final pre-Winter push to get my brother dried-in. The mountain area keeps the goofballs away…plus it’s Wyoming.

          • Interesting day, met one of my brothers rural neighbors who lives in the same area in a place they built themselves. Main residence is Florida. Unabashed Trump guy. In two days he’ll be 82. Worked all day, spry and strong and steady, and paid attention to make sure we had material at the ready. Didn’t have to ask him anything, he just anticipated what we needed and did it.

            He said something that caused me to ask which branch of service he served? Marines, Special Forces. This older man was one of the most amazing people I have met in a long time, and tough. Does his own homestead work. His wife is the same.

            Told him we need a couple million of his type and attitude in 18 year olds.

  5. IDA:
    1. Kalinin K-7
    2. Sikorsky CH-37 Mojave
    IDT:
    1. Japanese Type 2 “Ka-Mi” amphibious tank
    2. Russian SU-101
    IAC:
    1. Russian BA-10

  7. Elysium. [spoilers]

    I wanted them to show the next 90 days after Matt Damon’s character brought the dirt people to Elysium. Hell, 30 days would probably do. The medical systems would have been destroyed by idiots beating on the damned machines after someone could not be revived. The villas trashed and then burned (raging fires are extra fun on an orbiting torus). The inhabitants raped and murdered. If they were lucky. Others would be tortured to death. That’s the first week. In a month, food followed by water riots among the surviving illiterate savages. Because the systems to run water reclamation would have been overwhelmed and then deliberately trashed, and the people with knowledge of how to fix things murdered previously. The station would become unstable (so far as I can tell it was supposed to be 75 miles up). Eventually they’d find three magical negro women who could do orbital mechanics math in their heads better than any white man or teams of white men could with calculators (I saw this in a documentary about the US space program so I know it’s true). These three sassy proud independent women what don’t need no man would come up with a brilliant plan to set things right. Then somehow the entire station would de-orbit catastrophically, with the bulk of the wreckage landing on the UK and Western Europe. Because of course it would. [Roll credits]

    Sure, the “elite” Elysium dwellers were assh, er, bad people. But that doesn’t mean the dirt people were good. (If nothing else, treat someone like an animal long enough, and the odds are good he’ll behave like one eventually*.) And the “President Patel” thing is a nasty warning about what is coming down the pike. It won’t be good.

    *the really dangerous ones are the ones who remember that they are Men.

    • If I had been running the space station, I’d have:
      1- A lot larger and less dysfunctional ground team to keep the dirt people in check.
      2- A second space station habitat because two is one and one is none.
      3- The space stations would have been at lagrange L4 and L5 and it would have given me adequate time to shoot down the dirt people’s spacecraft.
      4- I would have launched on warning rather than waiting for them to get close.
      5- I would also have a lunar facility as an additional fallback.
      6- Euthanize Matt Damon when he gets a lethal dose of radiation.
      7- Overthrow the pussies who are running Elysium.

      Yeah, magic negros. We elected a queer crack addict half-blood who married a dude/drag queen negro. How did that work out for us?

  8. Flaming datum is the ROK ‘SOP’, if they don’t know who is in/on/under the water… Makes for some ‘interesting’ exercises! I ‘believe’ the Mohave was one of the first helos to have a stability system installed, built by Lear.

  10. Ah, the good old stand by, build a massive orbiting ELITE HABITAT while old earth goes to hell.

    But what happens when earth loses the knowledge to supply the geosync hab and the space elevator breaks down? We’re left with the spirits of dead astronauts in orbit.

    I see a short short story.

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