AN APACHE IN SNOW: Based on a quick survey of the comments, yesterday’s snow/winter training photos brought back chilling memories for many vets. Yes, Germany’s cold, Alaska’s cold but so is Korea. Here’s a 17th Cav AH-64 Apache after a Korean snow storm. Maintenance must go on. Here’s a 9th Air Force P-38 being prepped for action on a snow-covered airfield during the Battle of the Bulge. I’ve no idea where the airfield was located.
Archive for 2023
January 21, 2023
READER FAVORITE: krosa -10℉ Winter Gloves Men Women.#CommissionEarned
ATTRITION UPDATE: Expanding The Shrinking Russian Army. Vlad’s in another bind.
MARK FELTON: Secret Swiss Units on the Eastern Front 1941-43 (Video).
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Gavin Newsom’s wife’s films shown in schools contain explicit images, push gender ideology, boost his politics.
“Newsom’s films and curricula are saturated with images lifted directly from pornographic websites, their URLs visible onscreen,” [Open The Books founder Adam Andrzejewski] added. “Minors are exposed to social commentaries about privilege and oppression, and one commentator says Americans need to ‘express shame and sorrow about who we are and what we’ve done’ as a society.”
“When paired with calls to organize and spread the films more widely, it’s clear that Siebel Newsom seeks to activate students politically and in accordance with some radical ideologies about gender, identity, race and privilege,” Andrzejewski said.
Okay, groomer.
WEIRD, AND AFTER THEY GOT WOKE, TOO: Google cuts 12,000 jobs, the largest layoff in the company’s history.
REPORT: PRESIDENT KLAIN TO RESIGN. Ron Klain to step down as Biden’s chief of staff: Report.
HOW IT STARTED: Defunding the Police Is Not Nearly Enough.
—New York magazine, June 12th, 2020.
How it’s going: Why Everything at Walgreens Is Suddenly Behind Plastic.
—Curbed, a spinoff of New York magazine, Wednesday.
Back in 2013, I wrote a lengthy post on Charles Bronson’s first Death Wish movie, filmed on location in the clapped out, crime-ridden Manhattan of the 1970s, and concluded:
In contrast, New York has improved immensely since the period depicted in the original 1974 Death Wish. Naturally, New York’s bourgeois-bohemians, as David Brooks would call them, would welcome a chance to return to the hell of Manhattan in the ‘70s, as Daniel Henninger noted in a 2005 Wall Street Journal article:
The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the ’70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.” Laurie Anderson, a well-known New York artist and performer, admits the ’70s were considered “the dark ages” but “there was great music and everyone was broke.”
* * * * * * *
New York is famous for many things, and the reason the whole world knows this is because New York is a city of artists and writers. Though genius may find its muse anywhere, the Times’ commentators are correctly saying that most artists need to have personal flint chipping at social steel to spark the furnace within. But could it be that New York’s great weakness–beyond the public employee unions, beyond the economic obtuseness–is that its leadership elites are fatally enthralled by a reputation for creative fecundity that has been conjured and kept afloat by the city’s artists and writers? At the center of this New York myth is the belief that everyone here is clever, and so “anything is possible.”
But it isn’t. Everyone here isn’t clever.
Over eight years in the 1970s, New York lost more than a half-million private-sector jobs, according to E.J. McMahon and Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose essential travel guide to these years and their aftermath may be found in the current Winter issue of the Public Interest. During the 1970s the real New York nightmare wasn’t lived in the SoHo funkytown, but in the funkless outer boroughs.
Many of the city’s most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls. Hell has always seized over-developed imaginations. But what attractions hath hell for average Joes who can’t cop a “life” in SoHo or Williamsburg? Then as now, they just took hell’s hits in the neck, or left. In economic terms, much of creative Manhattan simply “free-rides” on the backs of the workers whose tax payments constrain the bankruptcy sheriff.
As Kyle Smith wrote this month, today he and fellow New Yorkers “grouse about soda bans and Citi Bikes. Twenty years ago, we worried about being mugged or murdered. Electing a Democrat who demonizes the police would ignore the luxury provided by two decades of safety.”
And here we are.
Meanwhile, 95 miles down the Northeast Corridor: Philadelphia Neighborhood Like a ‘Walking Dead’ Episode as Soft-on-Crime Policies and Animal Tranquilizer Craze Take Over the City.
THE BRIDE IS 30 YEARS YOUNGER, LOOKS 50 YEARS YOUNGER, AND HAS A PHD IN CHEMICAL ENGINEERING: Over the moon! Buzz Aldrin marries on his 93rd birthday: Astronaut legend ties the knot for a fourth time as he shares sweet photos with new bride Anca Faur.
THEY’RE FEELING PRESSURE, AND SHOULD BE: TVA creates independent panel to review rolling blackouts before Christmas.
Multiple factors contributed to TVA’s struggles on Dec. 23 and 24, some of which are still being identified. Two that could impact the utility’s reliability going forward are:
Increased demand due to population growth and electrification in the Tennessee Valley.
Increased weather extremes in both summer and winter due to climate change.
Prior to the storm, TVA had planned to run all of its power plants to meet the increase in demand from heating systems because of the cold. In the early hours of Dec. 23, however, just as the the storm was beginning, TVA lost one of its largest electricity generators, the Cumberland Fossil Plant, located in Stewart County. During the winter storm, TVA also struggled to keep some of its backup natural gas plants and its largest gas plant in East Tennessee, John Sevier, running consistently.TVA experienced the highest single day of demand in its history on Dec. 23 as the winter storm overtook the region and sent temperatures into single digits and in some areas, below zero. With the demand for electricity so high and the supply limited, TVA said it went through its 50-step emergency plan to preserve the grid, and for the first time ever reached the last step: implementing rolling blackouts.
“Increased weather extremes?” On this day in 1985, Knoxville hit 24 below zero. But in 1985, the power stayed on. This year we got rolling blackouts for single-digit temperatures that were 30 degrees higher.
As for increased demand, well, TVA is supposed to forecast demand and stay ahead of it. And increased electrification? Maybe stop pushing heat pumps and electric stoves. Gas heat doesn’t strain the grid.
Related: Here’s why TVA said there were rolling blackouts before Christmas.
The rolling blackouts were a symptom of failure. That shouldn’t happen.
Also: ‘They failed us’ — Rep. Burchett burned by blackouts, sends letter to TVA demanding answers.
IT’S OVER JOE: New York Times Throws Joe Biden Under the Bus.
Of course, Jonathan Alter would also have you believe that “the Obama-Biden administration set an exceptionally high ethical standard and usually met it,” and postures about “Mr. Obama’s scandal-less White House” without mentioning the fact that the Chicago Saint had a “wingman” for an attorney general and a cachet as the first black president that meant that he would never be prosecuted no matter what he did, even supply weapons to drug cartels. Alter’s shoddy reasoning and reflexive partisanship aside, however, the real significance of his op-ed is that it signals that the curtain is closing on Biden’s clownish and disastrous star turn as the presidential figurehead. Whether his replacement will be The Cackler or some other socialist ideologue remains to be seen.
But what Brave New World awaits? Kamala Harris: Work in Progress Or Piece Of Work?
WELL, THAT WOULD BE GOOD: A probiotic supplement may fight antibiotic-resistant infections.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: GoFundMe Page Started To Help Complete MLK Statue.
“It’s just hard in Biden’s economy,” added artist Hank Thomas. “Nowadays you can’t even complete a simple sculpture with just $10 million dollars. The price of bronze has just skyrocketed beyond belief!”
At publishing time, GoFundMe announced that this was the fastest-ever fundraiser to hit its goal in the site’s history as Americans of all races came together to finally make a beautiful piece of art to honor MLK Jr.
Much faster, please!
THE FIERO FERRARI? The Mera: A rare Pontiac that looks like a Ferrari 308. “[A total of] 247 were made from 1986 to 1988, until Ferrari found out and sued them. Ferrari ordered the production dies and everything relating to the car to be destroyed.” Discount Magnum P.I!