Look what they’ve done to it.
But at least they charge high tuition for this maleducation, so it’s got that going for it.
Category Archives: History
China’s Aircraft Carrier
They’re about to find out just how hard it is to run one. It has this amazing statistic that I’d never seen before:
Between 1949, when the U.S. Navy began deploying jets on a large scale, and 1988, when the combined Navy/Marine Corps aircraft accident rate achieved U.S. Air Force levels, the Navy and Marine Corps lost almost 12,000 aircraft and more than 8,500 aircrew.
Emphasis mine. That’s accidents, not combat. And what they mean by getting the rate to Air Force levels, is reducing it to that rate. In other words, those are the casualties of learning how to fly combat-proficient aircraft from carriers, and it didn’t really occur until the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet.
Here’s a related link: the U.S. Navy’s transition to jets.
And yet we obsess about safety in spaceflight.
[Via email from Jim Bennett]
A Bridge To The Future?
No, a bridge back to 1933.
It’s a never ending source of hilarity and irony that these people fashion themselves to be “progressive.”
Long Pork
It was what’s for dinner in pre-historic Britain.
Sharpsburg
We’re heading through a parade of sesquicentennial anniversaries of the Civil War. Today is the anniversary of Antietam. Mac Owens remembers (well, not literally — I’m pretty sure he wasn’t there):
The Battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg was a tactical draw. McClellan deployed his troops piecemeal, permitting Lee to hold on by his teeth. Time after time, Lee, badly outnumbered and with his back to the Potomac, was able to avert disaster by shifting his forces from one part of the field to another. For some reason, McClellan did not commit his reserve, which may well have crushed the Confederates. That the battle ended as a tactical draw is seen as a tribute to Lee’s generalship.
But it marked the failure of Lee’s preferred strategy. For the Confederacy, Antietam marked flood tide. As events were to prove, having failed, the South would only recede.
On the other hand, the battle, although a draw, provided an opportunity for President Abraham Lincoln to reverse Union fortunes just as surely as Lee had reversed those of the Confederacy. Thus, after Lee’s invasion of Maryland was turned back, Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, which gave the Confederates 100 days to submit to the Union or face the prospect of immediate emancipation of its slaves. The time had come, Lincoln wrote to Cuthbert Bullitt, to stop waging war “with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water.”
Southern Unionists, loyal slave-holders, and Democrats charged that Lincoln was “revolutionizing” the war by issuing his proclamation. Lincoln did not disagree, admitting that once the proclamation took effect, “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation and extermination.”
Had McClellan not been so (repeatedly) timid in following up, the war might have ended years sooner. But it took a Grant to understanding the key to victory.
The Eleventh September Eleventh
I don’t really have anything new to say, but Glenn has a link roundup.
Obama’s iPhone Flub
Some thoughts on the unjustified arrogance of The One. He really is insufferable. Again, I have no idea why people find him “likable.” I never have, except in that one speech in 2004.
The Democrats’ New False Campaign Narrative
I have some thoughts on Bill Clinton’s nonsense, over at PJMedia.
A commenter over there makes a good point. If you look at the curve of the current “recovery, it does appear that it started to rebound symmetrically, but something happened to cause it to stall out. His theory is that it was the passage of ObamaCare. I think that’s a good guess.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related thoughts from Jen Rubin:
If you had been dropped from outer space into the Democratic National Convention, you would have thought that we enjoyed full employment, reduced poverty and stared down Iran, leaving us with deeply important issues like paying for birth control for grown women. You would have thought that a large majority of Americans weren’t sympathetic to Israel and weren’t religious. You’d have thought that the federal government had money to burn and no looming debt crisis. You would never have thought that Obama had signed a “historic” health-care bill. And you’d have thought that the political heavyweight in the Obama household was Michelle. (Well, you might have been right about the last one.)
But knowing that the America of 2012 is so very different than the convention portrait, it’s worth asking how the Democrats’ convention became so divorced from reality.
As she says, it’s been a long time coming.
The False Narrative Of The Obama Campaign
My thoughts on what the Romney campaign should do to combat Democrat lies about the economy in the last weeks of the election.
The Dutch Slave Owners
These people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, let alone to vote on legislation. If I lived in her district, it would be multiple face palms per day.