April, 2014 archive

My local rag tells the story of a fighter pilot who dared to reveal a safety hazard in the F-22. Now he’s in the Catch-22, the best catch there is.

Here’s the intro:

The Air Force has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past two years correcting problems with its premier jet fighter – issues that Capt. Joshua Wilson helped expose by speaking up, both to his bosses and on national television.

Since then, Wilson’s career as an F-22 Raptor pilot has stalled. A member of the Virginia Air National Guard’s 149th Fighter Squadron, Wilson hasn’t been permitted to fly the jet since early 2012. He’s fighting disciplinary actions that he sees as retribution for going public.

Whatever else happens, the military can always be counted on the protect its own brass.

Read the rest and tell your friends.

Laurie Roberts, in a larger article about Welfare Cowboy Cliven Bundy, espies the Secesh in the Southwest:

Our (Arizona’s–ed.) Legislature is filled with people who long for the good old days when states seceded from the union. Every year, we see bills declaring all EPA regulations null and void in Arizona and bills declaring federal gun laws null and void in Arizona and bills requiring federal agents to check in with county sheriffs before they try to enforce federal law in Arizona.

There’s the always-popular biennial effort to declare Arizona a sovereign state, which is code for we want control of federal land so we can eliminate all those vexing environmental regulations aimed at assuring clean water and clear air and such.

Read the rest.

Shaun Mullen explains the con:

In 2010, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie singlehandedly killed a planned $8.7 billion commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River that virtually everyone else believed would ensure the future health of the New York region’s economy. Christie argued that it was just too damned expensive for the frugal times in which he governed, an argument that held little water then and has now sprung a ginormous leak.

This is because it turns out that Christie planned all along to use New Jersey’s share of tunnel construction dough to bail out the state’s highway and bridge system, which under his “leadership” had been driven deeply into debt.

Follow the link for more about this and other issues. You will be glad you did.

Writing at Japan Times, Andrey Borodaevskiy sees a disturbing undercurrent to the Russian people’s support for Vladimir Putin’s Ukrainian policy: cult of Putin personality.

I don’t know enough to agree or disagree, but I think it is worth a read, not only for what he has to say, but also because our own media has a disturbing case of parochial tunnel vision as regards events in the rest of the world.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev could not have hoped for this kind of uniformity of public opinion and ardent loyalty that we observe in Russia now. Why? Because there was no personality cult of “Mr. General Secretary” on the scale the modern boss has built up for himself through the clever combination of stimuli and intimidation.

Personality cult does not come from the grass roots. It is cultivated from above, more often than not inspired by the person who is the object of the cult, as was the case with Josef Stalin — the biggest “seducer of the masses” of all (except perhaps for Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who also was an Oriental-style ruler, not a product of Western civilization).

In a nutshell, personality cult is a euphemism for dictatorship.