Solomonic decision

Posted by lex, on March 6, 2006

By an 8-0 decision today (newly installed Justice Alito didn’t participate), the Supremes gave the back of their collective hand to the notion, stertorously maintained by law school professors in certain elite universities, that allowing military recruiters the same degree of access as other firms somehow violated those professors’ freedom of speech and association rights. And by the way, pass us another slice of that government cheese, will you?

An insufficiently brief conversation between your humble scribe and a thoroughly hypothetical individual/correspondent

Posted by lex, on Feb 28, 2007

Your humble scribe: Just sign here on the white piece of paper.

Thoroughly hypothetical individual/correspondent: It’s black.

YHS: What is?

THIC: The paper.

YHS: I’m not sure I understand, I meant this piece of paper right here. The white one.

THIC: Black. It’s clearly black.

YHS:

THIC: BLACK!

YHS: Ohh-kayyy. Just sign at the top there.

THIC: That’s the bottom.

YHS: I don’t…

THIC: BOTTOM!

YHS:

THIC:

YHS: Is this one of those, “It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” things?

–

Update: I was deceived! The “InstaCracker” thing should have given it away, combined with the characteristically stubborn resistance to reason and the psychically starved self-approbation but I simply wasn’t paying that close attention.

I’m just not, you know: That in to him.

Update 2: Do you not, when faced with this kind of behavior, at some level wonder, what the f***?

---

09-30-20 I came across this post last night and wondered what it was all about. Well, it referred to an exchange 2 days earlier when a troll came upon the commentariat. As Lex said at that time, it was like trying to wrestle a pig. Follow the links lex provided above – and I included the comments.

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An inconvenient image

Posted by lex, on February 26, 2007

Mark Steyn on Al Gore at the Oscars:

I’m outraged to hear that Al Gore is going to the Oscars in Ralph Lauren. Isn’t he aware of how much of the world’s energy is used up pressing a full-length suit? Why can’t he be as environmentally responsible as Cher and just wear a non-resource-depleting carbon-neutral sleeveless, backless, frontless, sideless, legless diaphanous pair of chiffon slivers that snake down his nipples, cross over his bikini wax and knot discreetly in his buttock cleavage. That’s what anyone with a real care for the earth’s resources would do.

This is the stuff of nightmares.

My ritual denunciation

Posted by lex, on March 3, 2007

Let me state for the record that this little bit of pretended wittiness * by Ann Coulter was in exceptionally poor taste, and therefore worthy of a ritual denunciation:

The canary in the coal mine

Posted by lex, on August 1, 2006

Suddenly, in the wake of the Qana disaster, Israel’s war against Hizballah seems to be going badly. Whatever moral space was temporarily was ceded to the Jewish state by a generally anti-zionist Europe along with certain parts of the Arab Middle East more usually known for reflexive judenhasse has now seemingly evaporated. The Secretary of State looks ever more bedraggled with each foray into the diplomatic lion’s den – how  much of that could you take ? – while whatever shine once attached has come off the President’s well-earned reputation for stubbornness in defense of what he believes to be right. No one wants to hear it anymore, he is alone, or nearly so.

Checking in

Posted by lex, on July 12, 2006

I must be brief: Cleaning quarters ends in five minutes, at which time 2500 Sailors otherwise profitably engaged in dabbing casually at bulkheads with foxtails, standing stoic watch with broomsticks at port arms or gazing thoughtfully upon knee-knockers with sandpaper limply in their hands will rush to the closest computer terminal and check their stock quotes, whereupon all the bandwidth now available to me in lieu of such activity will gently swirl (in a clockwise direction, this being the northern hemisphere) down into that great yawning abyss known as “Server Cannot Be Found.”

I love this story more than I ought to

Posted by lex, on February 23, 2007

Don’t mess with vets:*

Posted by lex, on February 23, 2007

SAN JOSE,

One of the tourists — a retired member of the U.S. military aged about 70 — put assailant Warner Segura in a head lock and broke his clavicle after the 20-year-old and two other men armed with a knife and gun held up their tour bus Wednesday, said Luis Hernandez, the police chief of Limon, 80 miles east of San Jose.

The two other men fled when the 12 senior citizens started defending themselves. The tourists then drove Segura to the Red Crosswhere the man was declared dead. The Red Cross also treated one of the tourists for an anxiety attack, Hernandez said.

I’m sorry the mugger died – armed robbery, after all, is not a capital offense – but damned proud of a man 70 years of age that can stand up and defend himself when the time comes.

Maybe we should send these guys over to Walter Read * when they get home. Straighten things out.

(H/T to the ‘Mander)

** 09-28-20 – Original link gone; substitute found – Ed.

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Good news, bad news

Posted by lex, on February 15, 2020

The good news is that my thesis topic has been approved!

The bad news is that I’m now on the hook for a 100-page thesis.

That guy? Who turned me on to this 24-month program eighteen months ago?

Dead.

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Su-30MK Video

Posted by lex, on February 10, 2020

I always loved getting in the proverbial “knife fight in a phoneboot” that BFM represents. But I have to admit that watching this video of the Su-30MK being put through its paces made me thougtful. I could do a lot of things with the Hornet. I could sometimes make her sing. But there are a lot of things this guy is doing that I couldn’t have done.

Retired USAF MGEN Hank Stelling agrees according to the email in which I received this clip, saying:

This is for those of you who will understand how remarkable this really is. Any way you slice it, this is pretty impressive. Great camera work. This remarkable aircraft and its pilot demonstrate what I thought impossible for a high speed jet fighter. In the SU-30MK, Russian aviation has surpassed that of the US and its NATO allies. This truly impressive fighter can stall from high speed flight to stop in less than a second.

It can fall back on its tail, without compressor stall, and go into a flat spin and recover in less than a minute. There is no aircraft in any country’s inventory that could stand up to it in a dog fight.

So. Probably a good idea not to climb into the phonebooth with the Su-30MK. Maybe send along an AIM-120 or an AIM-9X instead.

Sort of like a “proxy fight.”

___________________________________________

09-27-20 The video that Lex referenced wasn’t available online. H/T to xbradtc for finding a similar one – Ed.

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Which would have been useful before I went to flight school…

Posted by lex, on February 10, 2007

As usual, the BBC carries some unwelcome but – in retrospect – unsurprising news today:

High-flying men are not as attractive to women looking for love as those with an average job, scientists say.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the University of Central Lancashire research found the 186 female students asked preferred good-looking men. But within that group, those without top careers were deemed most suitable, the Personality and Individual Differences journal reported. The team said women seemed to feel high-flyers would not be good fathers.

And they wonder why we can’t understand them. I could have been a SWO!!!

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