Monthly Archives: June 2017

The Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornet scored its first kill when a Syrian SU-22 Fitter was downed by an F/A-18E Super Hornet most likely from the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) allegedly deployed to Sixth(6) Fleet in the  Mediterranean Sea according to GlobalSecurity.org.

I was never Blessed to encounter SU-22’s or the earlier Su-17/20 variants or I would’ve been writing endless posts about “there I was….” shooting them down. Known by its NATO codename: Fitter, they are very fast air to ground attack airplanes built as a knock off the USAF F-111 Aardvark of the 70’s.

Fitters have very limited air-to-air capability and only carry archaic thermal seeking … Continue reading →

This is a reprint of a review I wrote published over a decade ago in the Daily News of Galveston County. It first appeared in 2006.

Seawriter

Authors give balanced view of Texas Rangers

By Mark Lardas

So here’s the Audible.com blurb for a field guide to swamp-dwelling troglodytes.

A Thought-Provoking Journey
Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interests. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild journeys to Louisiana bayou country – a stronghold of the conservative right. Though this community’s ideas differ vastly from her own, she realizes that Americans share a few key principles – the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for our children. Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help listeners understand what it feels like to live in “red” America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: … Continue reading →

So amid all the swirl of investigations, congressional testifying, and, of course, the shooting of republicans, here is an interesting item.

Apparently Putin has offered asylum to Comey! Never knew the guy had such a sense of humour.

Your own Olive checking in from an urban public school. Yesterday, during the students’ regular dose of Islamic indoctrination, one of the actors in a dramatic reading uttered the F word. Well, the students went wild. That got a big reaction, and I was very proud of our students, because we teach them not to talk like that, and we model professional behavior, and we would be hypocrites if we then turned around and let some actors in an assembly drop F-bombs everywhere.
After the students settled down, the performers carried on with their lament about how hard it was for Muslims in the U.S. after 9/11. No mention of how hard it was for firefighters’ families who lost loved ones on that day. No, the correct lamentation, … Continue reading →

Another day in the arena of the courtroom.  A nice guy who is good at digging holes got screwed by a large undercapitalized general contractor who decided not to pay him after he went deep into debt to buy equipment to deliver their work.

Being an independent sort, he tried to fix an impossible cash flow hole by himself for almost two years before disaster hit.

As usual ,the US Attorney is trying to throw him to the wolves on a million legal fictions . She is an Obama holdover who seems to dislike whites, men and male Caucasians in random order.

So once again, on the witness stand, being cross examined by this entrenched swamp creature, explaining the situation to the attorneys for those owed money (Including the … Continue reading →