dangerous liberty

Check out this picture of a tornado illuminated by lightning. Snopes says it is the real deal.

Have a look at the Flexible woman. How to describe it in a word? Insectish.

Power Line gets it.

Nifty radar clip of FedEx arrivals during Thunderstorms over at Airline Pilot Central.

I can imagine the scene on the ground might be butt-clenching to anyone not used to FedEx’s 90 second average. (from this Mephis Hub fun facts quiz)

Got this link from Instapundit: Captain’s Quarters, as usual, has the best skinny on the situation in Iraq. Recently captured Al Q documents show a bleak picture for Islamist Jihad in Baghdad.

Centcom has a great page “What Extremists Say“, which has regularly updated video and translated documents.

UPDATE: It does concern me that our military is using MS IIS servers for their webpages. I’m surprised it isn’t hacked regularly and can’t stand seeing %20 in the URLs! But I’m picky that way.

By some miracle, this blog has evolved to ‘large mammal’ status in the TTLB ecosystem! Just a few days ago, I was an Adorable Rodent and was a Marauding Marsupial for the last few days. For some reason, over the hours, my rank has climbed, while by links have remained static and my average visits have dropped. Go figure.

Amazingly, my thinking is getting more clear. Where I used to just react to shiny or quickly moving objects, now I feel the urge to mark territory and hunt prey!

Thanks to those in the LLP group and The Alliance for the links and therefore the rapid evolution. I expect this is a fluke and soon I’ll be back to flicking my tongue at flying insects and sitting on eggs…I’m not known for consistent blogging…

Iraq the Model’s Omar points to this story (scroll to bottom of pg.6) in Centcom’s The Advisor weekly, billed as the “Official Weekly Command Information Report for the Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq”

Obviously, this weekly is the product of DOD Public Affairs officers, so expect it to be on the positive message the DOD wants told. However, it isn’t as if the Iraq ‘news’ product being delivered by MSM outlets is not the negative message editors and producers want told!

Regardless, it gives me hope for the people of Iraq.

An excerpt:

The students are continually struggling to understand a new language and different ways of doing things while simultaneously fighting for their lives and worrying about keeping their identities secret to protect themselves and their families from harm by insurgents.

But for them, they say it is worth it because they no longer fight for just one man — they fight for their country.

For Iraqi Capt. S., who was also an officer during the previous regime, that shift in mentality is priceless.

“I recently went to visit an Iraqi soldier in the hospital,” he said. “He had lost both his legs, and we went there to comfort him. When we were leaving, we told him, ‘May God be with you.’ He called back out to me, ‘For Iraq, I would give up my whole life, not just my legs.’”

Most of the Iraqi airmen have businesses or farms and are relatively well off already. But when the opportunity came to return to the service they love, regardless of the risk, they jumped on it.

Since Jan. 14, when the squadron was officially formed, the airmen have been sneaking in the shadows and many have hid their allegiance to the Iraqi Air Force to family and friends, some even to their own wives.

Captain S’s wife, concerned for her family’s safety, continually pleads with him to quit and has also asked his father to pressure him. But the captain, whose own son does not know he is currently serving, said, “If I don’t do it, who will?

“I dream that Iraq will someday be safe,” he said. “We will be at peace, and at peace with our neighbors. I wish for a civilized country and a better place for my children.

“I try to teach my son to respect the armed forces when he sees them in the streets,” he said. “One day when he grows up, I want him to know his father sacrificed during the worst period in his country in order for his children to have a better Iraq.”

Iraqi Flight Engineer J. also fights for the same dream and a chance to build a new Iraqi Air Force. He has been a flight engineer for 10 years, but until now has never felt able to express concerns to his superiors because of his rank.

“I’m impressed at how Americans treat each other as far as rank,” Engineer J. said. “They treat each other equally. During the previous regime there was a huge difference between a flight engineer and pilot. Now, we work together.

“Because of the treatment we’ve experienced from our instructors firsthand and the friendship they’ve shown us, it’s made me change my views on all Americans,” he said. “We understand the true (meaning of) American kindness.”

A pilot in training with the 23rd Squadron (transport), Iraqi Air Force, loads his baggage April 18, 2005, in Talil, Iraq, before taking off in one of three C-130 aircraft that the United States provided to the Iraqi Air Force. U.S. airmen from the 23rd Advisory Support Team, 777th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron are teaching the Iraqi pilots to use their new aircraft. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. David Foley
Hat tip, Iraqi Bounty Hunter

Donald Trump appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on the costs of the UN renovation project. An old pro where New York City commercial construction and demolition is concerned, The Donald tore the UN up one side and down the other, over transition plans, contingency costs and $27 million payments to an architect who had been fired and submitted no work.

Watch the whole hearing following the link above, or just watch Trump during the last half hour of the hearing.

Radio Blogger has the transcript and downloadable mp3 audio.

Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt, Powerline

A co-worker just emailed a link to Useful Dead Technologies, a sardonic piece, bemoaning the loss of the tried and true to new technology.

Here’s one complaint:

Volume control knobs
You’re driving down the road and that song comes on. You know the one, it really rocks and you must crank that sucker up.

But there’s no crank any more. You have to take your eyes off of the road to find the one button on the fifty buttons to turn the damned thing up or down. Thank God they invented cell phones so you can call an ambulance after you wreck your car trying to turn the volume down to answer your cell phone!

And if you want to adjust the tone, balance, or rear fade, forget it. You’re either going to have to stop the car, or get a passenger to do it for you. If, that is, he or she can find the owner’s manual to figure out how to.

The old technology used knobs. There was a volume knob on the left, and a tuning knob on the right. Behind the volume knob was a tone control, or two tone controls (treble and bass). The knob on the right changed the stations, and it had a knob or two under it controlling balance and sometimes fade.

Some less stupid car radio manufacturers still use knobs, albeit digital knobs. But even these are less useful.

Old fashioned analog potentiometer knobs not only could be used without taking your eyes off the road, they were far more precise. My car stereo (with its volume buttons you have to look at to adjust) has 25 discrete volume levels. Some stereos have 50.

The old fashioned analog volume controls had an infinite number of levels. They were analog. If you’re at the fringe of a reception area and the weather or whatever has caused the signal to drift, you could precisely tune it with your radio’s analog variable capacitor. Today if (for example) KSHE 95’s 94.7Mhz drifts to 94.8 and you’re north of Litchfield (about 50 miles), you’re out of luck, as you can tune to 94.7 or 94.9, but not 94.8200032010023445 like you can with an analog tuner.

Here’s the reverse: I live within a mile of a huge radio tower, WRUF in Gainesville. It broadcasts PBS TV and AM/FM Radio. The only way I can listen to radio stations which aren’t Rock 104 is if I have a digital tuner. All of the analog radios are bled into by the tower. Forget about AM. My 2.4GHz wireless headphones pick up the VHF TV signal when the base isn’t tuned or is off. The tuner for that signal is analog as well and if I don’t have it exactly correct, I get PBS while I’m working in the yard and want to jam tunes! Even then, as I turn my head or go behind the shed, instead of a fading signal or a bit of static, I get Arthur and the Berenstein Bears!

Although, I must say during the early days of digital radio, I preferred analog, because the LEDS were always burning out or the innards fried and whoop! No more radio. The new stuff seems to have improved greatly, as is usually the case with consumer goods.

Read Colson commenting on CS Lewis’ birthday, Discerning the Trends.

Lewis has had a great influence upon my Christian intellectual development. In him I found a great mental and spiritual depth and an ability to pierce the veil of established religious dogmas.

His insights into the nature of reality and (perhaps more importantly) his understanding of competing philosophies for the hearts and minds of men have always brought great satisfaction - one born of my own light, repeatedly flipping on as I read Lewis’ thoughts.

For instance, in The Screwtape Letters, a passage about the nature of eternity says the ‘present is full of eternal rays’. The past is already written and the future is uncertain, but the present moment is the place where we choose and act. Even Christ said “The kingdom of God is NOW”.

This one insight is rich, deep and yet so simple. I marvel each time I consider it.

And in The Great Divorce, the most remarkable thing was the notion that God sends no one to hell, he makes the afterlife such that individuals at the doorstep of heaven are put in the position to reject entering in, and the clever thing was that those set in their ways and already solidly determined as to ‘how things should be’, rejected Reality for The Shadowlands.

Colson is absolutely correct that Evangelicals have some work cut out in terms of understanding the culture outside of the sub-culture of the church. It is one thing to know the bible inside and out, it is quite another to be able to deal with the epistemology of other world views, especially those dominant among the cultural elite.