That was Brady Armistead’s job as his helicopter rumbled toward a strip of desert 80 miles south of Kandahar, the capital of the Taliban government. He had a satellite forecast calling for clear skies. But satellite forecasts depend on ground data, too, and there was nothing from Afghanistan.
Five years earlier, when the Taliban seized power, it granted sanctuary to Al Qaeda and ruled by a strict interpretation of the Koran. No television or movies, mandatory burkas for women and long beards for men — plus no weather reports.
The Taliban considered forecasting to be sorcery. They fired the country’s 600 or so professional meteorologists, shelled the Afghan Meteorological Authority, and burned the country’s vast climatological archives.
That created a blind spot in global weather data, which is typically pooled and shared between the world’s governments. The Pentagon felt it had a fix in SOWTs like Armistead, jump-ready scientists with the God-given guts to do the weather behind enemy lines.
FK – Know thine enemies… and remember that we outnumber them.
That may not seem like much of a reduction, but anyone who has ever sat around a campfire knows that wood fires put off a fair amount of fire, as well as creating soot. This is what the EPA is concerned about.
To put that in perspective, they are asking for a 20% reduction in particulate emissions from what is really a rather old technology. This isn’t some sort of new chemical process that puts poisons into the air, but rather simple burning of wood, that only puts soot into the air. The worst it can do is to cause snow to become dirty.
FK – If I see an eco-commie after the war starts that’ll be what I call a ‘target rich environment.’
The point is, with drones of types, shapes and sizes, spanning the gap from military jets to electric toy helicopters, and everything in between, it is going to be impossible to tell drones belonging to the good guys from those belonging to the bad.
Not all drones will take off from airports where they can be monitored, and identifying them will not be as simple as looking at a visual aircraft recognition card or spotting the tail number of an aircraft. We have a questionable record identifying planes as it is. How are we going to identify tiny drones the size of large insects?
Like most rapidly advancing technologies are creating all sorts of legal gray areas such as how UAV videography affects privacy, governmental accountability requirements, public access to government records … the list goes on. Rest assured that a drone arms race of sorts will ensue and the story of drug smuggling or terrorist activities using drones of some sort will be raised.
Then it will be spun. The government will need more and more drones to “ensure the safety of Americans.” Legislation will be passed and funding allocated “for the sake of our children.”
One of the more difficult ideas to grasp in astronomy is the sheer scale of the cosmos. Even as a professional in the field it’s much easier to focus on numbers and data than really step back and appreciate scale. Every now and then there is an image that forces you contemplate scale, such as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Now NASA and ESA have released a new image of the Andromeda galaxy. It is the most detailed image of Andromeda ever made,and you can check it out in this video.
The total image has about 1.5 billion pixels, and shows over 100 million stars across 40,000 light years. In the image you can see the brilliant swirls of Andromeda’s spiral arms, but when you zoom in the dusty swirls resolve into individual stars. A vast sea of stars.Andromeda is relatively close by cosmic standards. It’s only 2.5 million light years away, which is why we can resolve the galaxy in such detail. But this shows only the brighter stars of Andromeda. It’s estimated that Andromeda contains about a trillion stars, most of which are too small and dim to resolve in this image. We’re still only seeing a fraction of the stars in this galaxy.
As you look on this image, keep in mind that this is only part of a nearby galaxy. Our own galaxy would look similar, as would many others. It’s estimated that there are 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe. That’s more than 10 galaxies for every man, woman and child on Earth. Multiply this image by ten, and for all of it there is only one single human being. The same is true for every person on the planet.
Images such as these often give a feeling of smallness. Within the vast cosmos we are merely dust upon dust. But to me it demonstrates just how rare and wondrous each of us are. We can look on an image such as this, see the spirals of stars, and we can understand the cosmos.
FK – It’s about revenue enhancement. If the ‘drivers license'(permission to drive one’s own property down a public ‘govt. of we the people’ road) was about ‘safety’ no to few teens would drive and all drivers over 65 or 70 would be re-tested every couple years and we’d all have to get re-certified in some form or another every so often.
FK – Sorry I didn’t get around to watching this one earlier. If we had the government we should have I’d have no problem telling someone to join and ‘serve.’ In fact I think we need to return to mandatory conscription for all because I encounter so many sheeple in the real world and on the net who have absolutely no concept of reality. This entire culture could use a drill instructor yelling in its face for a while.
His family later received notice that relations of the man buried alongside him had complained because Mr Smith was not an adherent of the Islamic faith.
Islamic religious authorities say that it is forbidden for non-Muslims to be buried alongside Muslims under normal circumstances.
Mr Smith’s family have now been warned by town hall officials that Mr Smith’s grave may be moved.
If Burbage parish council decides to overrule Mr Smith’s family’s wishes, it would fall to Mr Grayling’s Ministry of Justice to approve the application to exhume and relocate his remains.
His family, which includes eight children, 25 grandchildren and 40 great-grandchildren, have vowed to fight “tooth and nail” to stop any exhumation taking place.
FK – Maybe they’ll wind up in each other’s hell. The human race is truly insane. Wasting thousands of dollars to put a dead body into the ground then imagining that two dead bodies are going to care what goes on around them.
Some of the detractors of yesterday’s actions are missing something big here in the rush to disparage and condemn actions they don’t agree with. And yes, no argument, more edicts may be enacted as retaliation against hard core protests by oath-breaking political opportunists we all ought to recognize as the true extremists. The thing is, these defiant citizens are going to disobey any future edicts, too. What government enforcers do after that will determine the reactions of those who will not obey them.
We’ve moved into new territory, or more precisely, been moved into it whether we want to go or not. And the only thing those who disagree with such direct tactics can do about it is side with the antis, the same people who would call them extremists.
FK – Maybe the guy is a moron. But then we have to slice and dice all the versions of that.
This is war. We’re gonna have fakers, psyops, idiots, double agents and on and on.
In the Militia we used to have a saying: “If there’s five guys at a Klan meeting three of them are probably FBI agents.” Look up ‘Hutaree Militia’ and see how the Fed Nazis failed to railroad them into prison.
Lot’s of ground has been gained by ‘working within the system’ that the Founders bequeathed to us. The keys are defining that so that we aren’t just playing dupes to our domestic blood enemies who’d call us ‘extremists’ because we throw a rock at a rabbit in our garden if it was advantageous to them and if rocks were all we had left.
The other key is being ready for what will be required. Our domestic blood enemies will never, that’s the ‘never’ that’s in the dictionary, throw up their evil despicable little hands and say “Oh sorry we bothered you, we’re going home now to live in peace and Liberty with our neighbors.” Won’t happen. They’ve invested way too much time and money in the destruction of this country and the Bill of Rights. They will not walk away without a fight.
This means that when they say “Turn them in,” and the first raids happen and/or there’s a ‘gun turn-in point’ we’re ready to respond with the necessary force to stop them dead in their tracks. Why hasn’t the NRA focused on this as they should have long ago? I know, it’s a rich boys club and they’re too busy maintaining the status quo, for a short answer. Plus a lot of them are simply cowards.
Whatever starts the blood war, and it might not be over guns as events in Nevada last year so clearly proved, we shouldn’t rush headlong into it, but simply know ourselves and ‘know our limitations’ as a famous movie character liked to say. If all the ‘good people’ got off their mental and physical asses we could take our country back, but it would still be a costly affair, for the “Liberal”(commie) trash are just as sincere about enslaving all of us as we are about preventing them from doing so.
FK – If Fed or NGO or otherwise ‘instigators’ can show up and try to cause trouble at a commie rally such as happens all the time as it did in Ferguson why not at a Liberty rally? Simply don’t let them get away with it.
“A small group of people with a really loud voice,” says Cordaro about the bullies. Most of cyberspace has been quite supportive of her efforts and that makes “Jen the Archer” want to keep going. You couldn’t blame the former vegetarian if she thought otherwise. The online death threats have been graphic.
“People want to murder my first born child,” Cordaro said. “I don’t have any kids, but that’s pretty scary to think about.” She’s also been told she should be skinned alive.
As far as the social media death threats, Cordaro hasn’t done much about them, hoping they’ll just go away eventually. But things have escalated. Speaking exclusively to Mama Grizzly Radio on the matter, Cordaro revealed a situation now all too personal and real.
“What I really haven’t talked to the media about at all is the things that are happening at my home and my place of employment,” said Cordaro. “So the death threats and the harassment and vandalism has gone beyond social media at this point. I’m dealing with it every day in my mailbox, at my house, on my car, at my work. Because they’re very close to home the proper authorities are involved at this point.” Smart move from a smart woman.
FK – Why this couldn’t possibly be happening. All the “Liberal”(commie) trash are such peace-loving pacified creatures who’d never harm anyone or anything.
FK – No. The average piece of “Liberal”(commie) trash doesn’t want Liberty, not for itself or anyone. Liberty scares it to death and the idea of anyone around it being free is unacceptable to its nature.
We need to finally figure out what our enemies are and what will be required in order to finally be rid of them.
