08:02 – As expected for this time of year, we’re running just-in-time on kits. We get a batch of one type built just as we’re running out of another type. At times, including today, we’ll ship kits that we just finished building that day or the previous day. Our current run rate is two or three kits a day–60 to 90 kits a month–and increasing, which is reasonably good for early August. Now I need to go build more kits.
13:17 – Call me sexist. I don’t care. It’s bad enough when one of our young men is killed in action in the Middle East. When it’s one of our young women KIA, it’s an entirely different level of bad. And when that young woman is the mother of two small children, it’s simply indescribably bad. Caryn E. Nouv, age 29. What kind of society puts its young mothers on the sharp end?
“Now I need to go outsource the building of more kits to a smart high school chemistry grad.”
There. Fixed that for you… 🙂
Nope, that’s not something I can ever do, if only because of OSHA and other safety regulations.
Our local high today is predicted to be 72 deg F and the same for the rest of the week. Can somebody please alert AlGore that we here are being deprived of our fair share of Global Warming?
Is Huntington Beach still there? I thought it would be under water by now due to the ice caps melting.
My parents are in Maine this week. 65 F days and 50 F nights. Brrr!
10-4, I’m 1 1/2 crow miles inland, N 33deg 42.9min W118deg 2.1min, and 9 – 10 ft above mean sea level. In the politically correct gibberish of the Obamanoids, we are both thermally challenged and elevationally deprived.
We definitely need others to pay their fair share of taxes so that we may have our entitled federal support from FEMA, NTSB, FAA, SEC, FBI, NASA, DoD, FDA, CAB, CIA, NSA, CDC, NIH, and a myriad of others.
Can I pass on the CDC? My daughter has chronic Lyme disease. We just got our first denial of care (a test for lyme antibodies) from BCBS since the specific test is not mentioned in the standard of care by the CDC. We went ahead and paid for the $70 test which showed three positives. In fact, the CDC does not even acknowledge Chronic Lyme disease.
So what is the cost of your FEMA flood insurance this year?
“What kind of society puts its young mothers on the sharp end?”
A sick, corrupt, decayed and lost society. The late James Burnham said it best in his book title: “Suicide of the West.”
Not to worry, though; we can vote Libertarian and write our congressman.
When it’s one of our young women KIA, it’s an entirely different level of bad.
This is nothing new unfortunately. John Ringo, an SF author of some note, dedicates all of his books to USAF Captain Tamara Long who was killed in Afghanistan in 2003.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1439133328/1439133328__c_.htm
“As always:
For Captain Tamara Long, USAF
Born: May 12, 1979
Died: 23 March 2003, Afghanistan
You fly with the angels now.”
You gotta be tough to be a medevac chopper pilot.
We definitely need others to pay their fair share of taxes so that we may have our entitled federal support from FEMA, NTSB, FAA, SEC, FBI, NASA, DoD, FDA, CAB, CIA, NSA, CDC, NIH, and a myriad of others.
You forgot DHS, soon to be run by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston apparently. She is a real piece of work. DC can have her fulltime.
AFAIK, flood insurance is basically worthless, does not cover the most likely stuff like drywall and carpeting, does cover roofing and structure. Short of a tsunami, it would not help me much. I don’t have it as it was not required when we bought.
All is not lost, however, at a nearby intersection (within a mile of dead ending at the beach), there is a street sign pointing inland as the Tsunami Evacuation Route….as if there were any rational alternative.
I know. I’ve been keeping an eye on our casualties since Desert Storm. I grieve for every one of them, but particularly for the women, and I worry about all of them.
The contact person for the Marine attack chopper unit we send stuff to, Meghan Gonzalez is 28 and has a young son. I worry about her and the rest of her unit every day.
Barbara knows me too well. When I told her that I’d picked a USMC unit to send stuff to, she said something like, “Let me guess. All women?” Yep. All women.
A society that still has some remaining individual free will allowed. I do not like it either, but it was part of the “contract” when they signed in and they fought for years to have the right to be allowed to do it. We may not like it but it was their choice and rightly granted.
I don’t want to seem insensitive but I agree with Marcelo. If she’d been a conscript it would have been different. I mourn all our people killed “over there” but men are people too, and if women want to be in combat and are killed or injured they knew it could happen. I just wish it was a pre-requisite for public office that you spend four years or more “over there” putting your life on the line.
“Nope, that’s not something I can ever do, if only because of OSHA and other safety regulations.”
I bet when you finished your masters degrees you never envisaged being a production line worker at age 60… 🙂
Part of the problem is everyone hasn’t figured out that a truck driver in a convoy is a combat role.
Women in combat are fair game. Personally, I’d rather that they not be on the front line. I’m perfectly happy to have women on reasonably secure platforms like an AWACS or decent sized warship. I wouldn’t want to be on the front line with women because if one was captured I or my male colleagues might do something stupid, and the enemy would know that.
Men do stupid things to rescue male buddies as well, but not nearly as often or as stupid as they’ll do to rescue one of their women. You can’t train out a couple million years of evolution. Men are evolved to defend their women and children first, their group’s women and children second, and women and children generally third.
Obviously, there will be situations where women have to fight, but our job as men is to do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. If it does, we’ve failed. And I’m not talking about customs or a social contract here. I’m talking about pure biological imperatives. Biologically, any woman of breeding age is much more valuable than any man. There was a sound biological reason for the traditional “women and children first”, just as there is a sound biological reason for the current version, “young families first”.
I don’t agree that women in the West are that valuable, because they, and many guys, don’t live up to their breeding potential, nor is it even desirable that they do so. My sister had four kids, her two eldest have two and one (so far, I expect she’ll go for a second in the next few years.) In principle men should go around impregnating women (any women) and women should seek to be impregnated by highly “fit” men. But this just isn’t happening in the West nowadays, so I don’t think fit young women are as valuable as they once were.
Sure, I’d make more effort to help or save a woman than I would a man, but as you say that’s just evolution’s training. Any woman I save from death or serious injury is unlikely to increase my “fitness”.
You’re applying a contemporary world view–one that I have no serious disagreements with–to the issue. I’m talking pure biology and evolved instincts.
I would never lift a finger to save, or protect, Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah, you would, without thinking about it. Just like you jerk your hand back when you touch a hot stove burner.
No kidding. Several times there have been women in immediate danger or risk of serious danger, women whom intellectually I would happily see die in a fire … and I helped them out of danger. No free will entered the situation. It pisses me off, actually. I don’t like being a fucking robot. No, wait. That sounds like a porn movie or a Japanese consumer product. Anyway, it annoys me.
(One was a potential mugging — a group of young men drifting close when we were leaving the office after a late evening. One was a dead car in winter, before the days of pervasive cell phones. One was an allergic reaction or something.)
Ray may be right about not lifting a finger; his and my wiring may have gotten screwed up a while back for various reasons. Dunno about him but I ran across VC, NVA, Khmer Rouge, and Pathet Lao females that kind of short-circuited my ‘knight in shining armor’ stuff, and added to that was running into some seriously deranged and dangerous ones as a street cop.
As I said, “Men are evolved to defend their women and children first, their group’s women and children second, and women and children generally third.”
Your “VC, NVA, Khmer Rouge, and Pathet Lao females” were not members of your family or your group and it’s pretty easy for guys, particularly in combat” to override the “women and children generally” part. Same thing for the women you encountered as a street cop. They weren’t members of your group.
A late friend of mine was a Green Beret and served two tours in Viet Nam. He told me one day about something that still haunted him, decades later. He and his team were lying concealed near a concentration of VC when a little Vietnamese girl stumbled across them. She was about to give them away. Jim said he had no choice. She was maybe three years old, but it was her or his team, so he killed her. After 30 years, he still grieved.
So like Ray said, Pelosi, HILLARY!, the Mooch, et. al., are not part of our group. We wouldn’t lift a finger. They are, in fact, a threat to our group.
The incident with the Green Beanie is pretty much the worst sort of thing that can happen in a wartime situation. I can certainly understand him being upset thirty years later; I strafed people and no doubt hit some that had just got caught up, but they were among others shooting at us, also a difficult situation and it still bothers me. Especially when one knows what one knows these thirty or forty years later. And I know at least one contemporary drone operator has expressed deep regrets; his body count dwarfs mine.
I’ve killed children, but “children” only by modern standards where you’re not an adult until your
18th21st26th30th birthday. I figure, old enough to mug and rape, old enough to die.No, I’ve never missed a night’s sleep over it.