Archive for July, 2003
Mets: Flighty response breaks tension
Heh.
On the Mets flight from Philadelphia to Montreal Tuesday night — just hours after the Pirates had traded Kenny Lofton, Aramis Ramirez and Scott Sauerbeck — there was an excited ruckus in the rear of the Mets charter.One of the flight attendants came down and asked why they were so happy.
“We got Qusay and Uday,” Al Leiter exclaimed.
“I’m sorry,” the flight attendant responded, “I don’t know baseball. Are they any good?”
Just so there aren’t any draft choices involved in the deal…
I’ve just added a little headline box at the right from the Washington Post. It’s supposed to continuously update, but all the headlines are from May. I don’t know if it’s not working or if the WaPo is just that far behind. A toss-up, I guess.
Ecliptic Enterprises Corporation
Here’s a page with a number of clips from onboard cameras covering several rocket launches, including the July 20th launch of MER-A (Mars Exploration Rover A) Spirit.
I didn’t realize that all those solid rocket boosters on the Deltas didn’t fire at liftoff. Six fire at liftoff, and three fire after the first six are spent and dropped. Good stuff if you’ve got the bandwidth.
If you’re a Springsteen fan (and I know that you are) here’s a little blog covering the current tour including set lists.
BTW I’ve just installed the Google Toolbar 2.0 beta. It includes a Blogger “Blog This!” button, so I’ll be trying it out and tossing various little things up. This is one of them.
Update
I missed this the first time through the post about last night’s show in Giant’s Stadium
Ironically, cast and crew members of the Soprano;s watched the show from the section where Jimmy Hoffa is rumored to be entombed.
Heh.
Fort Lewis Stryker unit going to Iraq
As I’ve mentioned earlier (here and here) I think sending the new Stryker units to Iraq is a great idea. There will be problems, of course, but this will maybe give us time to uncover them and come up with good solutions before North Korea, or Iran, or Syria, or Saudi.
These light armored units will protect the troops better than the armored Humvees many in Iraq are now using, as well. Good move.
Taking the fifth: Armstrong wins
This has got to irritate Europeans, especially the French.
They’ll get over it. Or not. I’m not really worried either way.
Those readers that have played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons should be familiar with character “alignments”. Your alignment spells out your basic outlook on the universe, and is divided into “Good”, “Neutral”, and “Evil”. Pretty basic. Each of the three is also qualified with either “Lawful”, “Chaotic”, or “Neutral”, leaving you with alignment options such as “Lawful Good”, “Chaotic Neutral”, “Lawful Evil,” etc. One of the options is “Neutral Neutral”, or, as we always referred to it, “True Neutral.” True Neutrals were not aligned with anyone or any ideal.
I bring this up because it appears that a Swiss company refused to ship components of our GPS-guided JDAM units after the invasion of Iraq.
Swatch Group AG, and its Micro Crystal division in Gretchen, Switzerland, refused to send key components used in the bomb guidance equipment used on the JDAM after the Iraq war began.
The Swiss company’s president blocked the parts to Honeywell, which was a subcontractor for Boeing Co. in making the tail kits for the satellite-guided bombs, 6,600 of which were dropped with great effect during the period of major conflict in Iraq.
The delay forced Boeing to buy the parts from a U.S. manufacturer at nearly twice the cost, a defense official said. The shipments resumed after the Bush administration pressed the Swiss government.
According the article, the Swiss government itself blocked shipments of British hand grenades.
There’s language in the House’s Defense Authorization Bill that would require defense contractors to “buy American” more often. The White House is generally opposed to “buy American” laws. While I think contractors should be able to get their components from wherever they can get the best price/performance results, this is potentially very damaging to our interests and puts the lives of our people at risk. Instead of “buy American” laws, why not write up contracts that include provisions for transfer (at the same terms) to other parties if something like this comes up? In this case, if the situation fit the requirements, other companies could acquire the rest of the contract for the JDAM parts. Also, specific companies that leave us in the lurch should be “blacklisted” when new contracts are up for review.
The Swiss company, and the Swiss Government for that matter, are certainly free to sell to customers that they are comfortable dealing with. If they oppose our actions, they are certainly free to stop selling us military components. On the other hand, we should also keep those sorts of things in mind, and the government has a responsibility to its people to make sure that our military gets what it needs.
All along I’ve been saying that we will learn who’s really on our side. This isn’t “just business.” If their alignment is different than ours, or if they interpret it differently, that’s their prerogative. But if it is, we can’t count on them and our dollars shouldn’t be going their way. It’s important that we stand up for the things we say we stand for. This would be one way of doing so.
Murdoc Online Has moved to Blog*Spot.
The MSN Groups site will be updated irregularly for a while. Please use the Blog*Spot site and update your bookmarks. Thanks.
Over the weekend I’ve been fixing the blog*spot version of Murdoc Online. Many pictures are now working, and a lot of the text has been formatted. I’m having trouble getting to all the posts, but I have a request in to tech support and maybe I’ll get a response. Anyway, if you’re digging through the MO archives (I mean, how better to spend your free time?) and something isn’t formatted correctly or is missing a graphic, please bear with me.
Also, I’ve added COMMENTS (using enetation) so feel free to post feedback on a post-by-post basis. Enetation is free, so I’m not sure what the quality will be, but it’s worth a try. We’ll see.
