Zone of Free Thought

I guess you could say I was attached in a way because my dad flew off the Hancock during this time. His jacket has that emblem on the back of it. Until recently I thought when he said he was among the first Pilots to take off with steam catapults that he was talking about World War II. But recently I discovered that the Randolph was the first carrier to use steam catapults. Maybe they use some different kind of catapult in late World War. But you can see in the footage here is of the Catapult test sleds. You also see that in some of the footage here the Skyraider being launched by the catapult off a different carrier and it's wheels are in the air before they hit in the end of the deck. There's footage from the Randolph that shows F9F cougars being catapult launched and tipping down towards the sea as they gained airspeed followed by an unassisted Skyraiders rumbling down the deck with its wheels in the air before it gets to the end. LOL  maybe you could let let a Skyraider Lum...

   By Jack Warner The fifteen million Americans that got insurance they didn't have before, and the ten million more that would have been kicked off plans, should be giving the sigh of relief heard round the world. What a thrill it was when watching C-Span this afternoon headed for that 3:30 vote when I saw someone walk to the speaker dais and hand a note to the Pro tempore at 2:29 and I realized they were pulling the bill and Republicans were spared being forced to vote and having an opponent run against that vote no matter which way it went. Their greatest fears would have been Republican primary challengers. Now they get to crawl back in there dark dank cave or holes in the ground waiting until Trump's "no amount of money is enough money" greedmongers call them out again to shill a "Tax Reform" bill. I've heard that in  some obscure ancient language "Tax" means "New" and "reform" means "Gulfstream G600" (N...

Many are trying to claim that relatively uneducated, largly poor, most rural, almost entirely lilly white people aren't responsible for trumps election. They often claim that a broad spectrum of people who hated immigration and had overblown terrorism fears weren't addressed by Hillary so they went to trump. There right in that Hillary didn't run a campaign run on fear mongering. They also often try to make number jump through hoops. The median income of trump voters was $72,000/year The median income of all Americans is $56,000/year. Tell me what you think that means? Some are claiming it means that large numbers of voters who were not poor voted for Trump. To me it just means he did get almost all the votes above $250k and the poor white and rural votes pull he number downward to $72k . Of course everyone in the investor class voted for Trump. The investor class votes Republican all the time. But there are not enough of them to win an election. it IS the poor wh...

 Used to be that if you needed information first you went to periodical publications like newspapers or magazines then your only other choice was libraries where you found drawers full of 3” by 5” index cards you had to slog through to find what you’re looking for. Or you go to the research desk where the person there would either know off the top of their head where to find it, or they would slog through the catalogs for you. It was hard for average people to check the accuracy of things they read. Then through the mid to late 1990’s libraries and other just about every other thing in the world became networked. From then if you really wanted to know the facts all you had to do was point click and type into search engines. That’s it. Virtually everyone born after 1985 or so has had all the information in the world at their fingertips. And yet through seemingly pure laziness many or most have squandered it!!! The world can be made safe from misinformed people and purpos...

The facts are.... Rosburg has always been a nervous type. He suffers anxiety and is not really comfortable in his own skin. I thought he’d pretty much outgrown this jitteriness, but he evidently still gets stress induced anxiety that sometimes makes his brain freeze. There’s actually a clinical condition called “stress induced amnesia” most people are familiar with when the run across someone they know, and suddenly can’t remember their name. It’s a kind of panic mode, and it explains how he could have screwed up his start setting, and then the “oh my god” full blown panic you see when he’s trying to race the car, find what’s wrong with the setting, fix it, steer the car look in the mirror all at the same time. It led him to make a really bad decision. I don’t know under whose rules you’re allowed to run someone off. His indecision was obvious, Lewis saw it, went for the gap with a huge overtake advantage and was driven off the track on the right hand side of the track with a r...

I meant to finish this long ago, right after the Democratic convention when I became, rightfully as it turned out, concerned that the way Bernie supporters talked about Hillary Clinton sounded alarmingly like the way Trump supporters talked. A young woman responded to something I wrote in the comment section of a YouTube page that showed Bernie supporters leaving the arena when Hillary came on stage to speak. They had drank the same coolaid Trump supporters had with the whole false narrative about Hillary that was fact free. When I challenged her to prove she knew what she was talking about, and she couldn't defend her position, she did what Trump supporters do. She went fact free into another rant mentioning she had protested the Iraq war. I think I told her something along the line of "opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one. You are entitled to  your own opinion. However, you are NOT entitled to your own facts. You don't know what the "f"you are talkin...

I met this guy on at a bike night in late July. He's just like he is on this video. Humble, smart, funny, open and fun to talk to. I originally just wanted to say hello to him because I'd seen part of this video and the next thing I know almost an hour had gone by and we were the last 2 bikes still there. (mine is restored as original 82 Honda Magna V-45). I think what he did here is astounding. You don't meet someone every day who made their own engine. You read that correct ly. He made the engine. He didn't assemble an engine out of parts manufactured by others. He carved molds out of wood and took the molds to a foundry that cast the parts out of aluminum. And then he did it again but made the engine bigger. One has 13,000 miles on it, the other has more. Reliable, clean and leak free, and the sound is just as remarkable as he describes it here. I'd love to see him make a living at this but he says to many people that say they are exited to have ...