Girls with Guns

General Zelal, 33, at a YPJ checkpoint-base, on the outskirts of Rabia, Kurdistan, on Aug. 7, 2014.

Usually I post these pictures because it brings a little light into an otherwise gloomy world. This one is a little more serious. We have male and female battalions of Kurdish soldiers fighting ISIS in Iraq. Marie Claire has the story.

Gone Girl

It's pretty dang good story, but they were a couple of little hiccups that bugged me. WARNING - SPOILERS AHEAD.

- Nick is talking to the detectives about some of the other people Amy had trouble with in the past. Nick asks about one in particular and the cops tell Nick that he is not a suspect. Nick persists and the cops are positive, but Nick DOES NOT ASK WHY and the cops don't tell him.

- Amy is at cabin in the Ozarks, packing to leave, and a couple of acquaintances come to the door and SHE LETS THEM IN. Nothing good will come of this. The man is poking through her cupboards, the woman is leaning against the door.

- The attorney Nick hires wants $100,000 retainer. Where the hell is Nick going to get that kind of money? He had to borrow $80 grand from his wife to buy the bar.

- After the press conference Nick wants to go to the police station and tell the cops his story. He does this against the advice of the attorney that he just hired for $100,000. WTF?

- Towards the end, when Amy announces she is pregnant again, Nick is suddenly consumed by fatherly concern. He's hanging with Psycho Bitch, waiting for something that will allow him to cut his ties to her and he is suddenly concerned because she's pregnant? Bullshit! She wants to be pregnant and have a kid, go for it. Me, I'm out of here. Fortunately there were only a couple of pages to go.

Orion Intercept

June 3, 2013, French Mirage intercepts a Russian Ilyushin Il-20 "Coot-A" ELINT over the Baltic Sea. 

The Russians and the Europeans are always playing cat and mouse games with surveillance aircraft. Sometimes they get pretty close to each other.

Norwegian AF P-3B Orion. Compare tip of lower left blade of closest prop with tip of upper right blade.

    On the 13th of September 1987 a Norwegian AF P-3B Orion flying over the Barents Sea was intercepted by an Soviet Su-27 flown by Vasiliy Tsymbal at an altitude of 13,000 feet. The Orion was from Andøya Air Base, the Su-27 was from Kilip-Yavr Air Base.
    The Orion is an American four engine propeller driven aircraft used for electronic surveillance and anti-submarine operations. The Su-27 is a Russian supersonic jet fighter. At 13,000 feet, the air is breathable, barely. AOPA says "Sure, everyone knows that you have to use supplemental oxygen if you fly more than 30 minutes at cabin pressure altitudes of 12,500 feet or higher. That at cabin altitudes above 14,000 feet pilots must use oxygen at all times."

Model of Su-27 Flanker - 'Red 36' - as flown by Lt Vasily Tsymbal by Flankerman
Note the damaged tip of the left tail fin.

    Tsymbal made a couple of close passes without incident. The third time he went below the Orion. When he pulled away, the tip of one of his two vertical stabilizers hit the prop of the Orion's outboard starboard engine, breaking an eleven centimeter long piece off of the tip of one of the blades. The broken piece punched a hole in the Orion's fuselage which caused it to lose pressurization.
    None of the crew were injured and the Orion made it safely back to Banak Air Base.

Brazilian Orion

    Since this was an outboard engine it was a real fluke that the piece that broke off hit the fuselage. If it was going to hit the plane it would have been much more likely for it to hit the inboard engine, but it would have been much more likely to fly off and not hit anything at all.
    When the prop lost the tip of one blade it would have become unbalanced and started vibrating horribly. Fortunately the crew was able to shut the engine down and feather the prop, otherwise things could have gotten much worse.

Andøya Air Base (Blue), Banak Air Base (Orange), both in Norway, and Kilp-Yavr Air Base (Red) in Russia. The black, wavy line is an approximation of the Arctic Circle.

Andøya has shown up in this blog more times than I expected.

Update July 2020 replaced embedded map because Google lost it. Bad Google.

Faces

I've been trying to figure out the name of this actor. I can picture him in my mind's eye. He's a big guy, well north of 300 pounds, often plays a mafia thug wearing a black suit. Something happened to his nose, looks like someone got a hold of it and twisted it or something. I've seen him in a number of films, he's always a bit player, not the lead, one of the villain's heavies or something. I can't think of any films that I know he has been in, maybe not any, maybe it was always on TV. He's been around for a while, since the 1990's I think. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon trying to figure out his name, looking at lists of gangster movies and gangster actors, but no luck.
    Then I got an inspiration: police sketch artist, which led to this site that lets you create your own faces, so I did. I just put this together, I don't know if it really looks anything like him. I mean, I got the basics, two eyes, nose and mouth, but are they anything like the guy actually looks like? I have no idea.

Update: Posthip Scott suggested that Richard S. Castellano might be the guy I am looking for. I have to admit my sketch does look something like him, but that's not the guy I'm thinking of. Richard's nose is straight, and he's too short. Richard was the guy who was teaching Michael to cook spaghetti when they went to the mattresses in "The Godfather".

I might have been able to put together a better picture, but it's a slow process, there are a bunch of selections to sort through for each feature, and the more time I spent at it, the more difficult it was to picture the guy I was thinking of.

Cruiser Aurora

Russian Cruiser Aurora moved to dockyard in St. Petersburg two weeks ago for overhaul.

Time lapse video of the move. Cool Russian tune.

The cruiser fired the opening shots of the revolution in 1917. The revolution will no longer be the main topic of the museum.

Please, FedEx, Fight Back Against Federal Extortion

Stolen entire from Forbes.  California Bob started working at Fedex this week and I was going to do a post on his trials and tribulations, but then I came across this story from a month ago.

by Bill Frezza

“Nice business ya got there. Pity if sumpin’ were to happen to it.”

Using fear and intimidation to extort money from legitimate businesses is a tried-and-true mafia tactic. But what happens when the federal government gets into this racket, demanding billions in “settlements” from an ever-expanding array of companies by threatening them with a corporate death sentence if they don’t knuckle under? We’re going to find out. Because this time, maybe they chose the wrong victim.

Tired of closing down state-approved medical marijuana dispensaries and seizing the property of their landlords, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California Melinda Haag, an Obama appointee, is hunting for bigger game. Flush from shaking down Walmart, Johnson and Johnson, and UPS for tens of millions, she has indicted the FedEx Corporation on drug trafficking and “conspiracy to launder” money charges. The prize purse this time? $1.6 billion.

What did FedEx allegedly do? The company shipped prescription drug packages from Internet pharmacies that Haag doesn’t like. That’s the drug trafficking accusation. Then it accepted payment for their services. That’s the conspiracy to launder money.

But wait, isn’t it the job of the Drug Enforcement Agency to prosecute Internet pharmacies that flout the law? That’s what FedEx thought. How are package delivery services – or insurers, landlords, or even utilities for that matter – supposed to distinguish between legitimate online pharmacies and fly-by-night operators? Have “know your customer” laws imposed on banks now metastasized into the forced deputation of all businesses to root out and deny services to anyone the federal government doesn’t like? Between prosecutions like this and the infamous Operation Choke Point, it seems that way.

FedEx long ago agreed to cut off shipments from customers identified as operating illegally, repeatedly asking the government for a list for which it is still waiting. That would put the investigatory onus where it belongs, while shielding FedEx from lawsuits by disgruntled customers. Why was this not enough? Where in the Constitution, or in what federal statute, is every business obligated to serve as police, judge, and jury over any potentially illegal activities of its customers?

The stakes are high, not just for FedEx, but for American competitiveness, free enterprise, and ultimately the rule of law.

If the principle is established that every corporation can be held criminally liable for the alleged transgressions of its customers, will every business have to hire an army of compliance officers like the Too-Big-Too-Fail banks? (Citigroup will have almost 30,000 compliance employees by year’s end.)

Will every customer have to fill out an intrusive government-approved questionnaire to satisfy every vendor that they are not breaking any of the tens of thousands of laws and regulations pouring out of Washington? And will even that be enough, given that many laws are so vague that they can’t even be defined until a prosecutor decides to use them as a cudgel to extract fat settlements in order to advance her career? And companies shouldn’t expect any help from the media, for whom corporate scandal allegations always make good copy.

The old Soviet intelligence apparatus relied on citizens spying on each other on behalf of the state. No one knew who to trust, children were turned against parents, and the all-purpose charge of “Hooliganism” could be used at any time to put anyone prosecutors didn’t like in jail. We don’t have hooliganism charges in the U.S.—at least not yet—but we do have vague and flexible federal crimes like “conspiracy” and “obstruction of justice.” These, combined with the threat of federal debarment, have become powerful tools used by prosecutors to bludgeon corporations into settlements rather than risk going to trial to clear their names.

Think it can’t happen here? It already is. Under Operation Choke Point, the Justice Department and other federal agencies are going after certain politically incorrect businesses by trying to cut off their access to the financial system. Their tool? Threats of subpoenas to banks. Already, many banks are cutting relations with payday lenders, a prime target of Choke Point, as my CEI colleague Iain Murray documents in a recent study.

For example, Al LePage, owner of Al’s Check Cashing in suburban Minneapolis, last February got a call from Wells Fargo giving him 30 days to cease and desist or risk losing his bank account. “The only explanation I got was that they’re not doing payroll advances anymore,” said LePage. “But I run a legal business.” As Peter Barden of the Online Lenders Alliance described it, Operation Choke Point “should … send a troubling message to banks that at any point regulators can force them to stop processing legal transactions simply because they don’t like a particular merchant or industry.”

That is why FedEx must avoid becoming fodder for FedExtortion. Unless and until corporate America fights back, forcing rogue prosecutors to take their cases to trial, we will keep seeing more and more of this. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors will continue using these cases to go on to greater glory, often seeking political office, by brandishing the corporate scalps they’ve claimed. Eliot Spitzer was just the beginning.

Antonio Perez had a story in Epoch Times two months ago about the indictment where he wrote:

But in a country where the government demands its portion of taxes on illegal drug dealing (such earnings must be reported to the IRS), FedEx must think it has a chance.

Jerrie Mock

Comrade Misfit put up a post about Jerrie Mock this morning. It didn't mean much until I followed the links and found she flew from Columbus, Ohio. That rings a bell! I was in Columbus then, and I remember there was a big fuss about Mock somebody. This happened right around the time Kennedy got shot, and that kind of overshadowed everything from that time period. Poking around, I came across this newspaper clipping:

Front page of The Columbus Dispatch, January 19, 1964, Via dispatch.com

So it wasn't just Columbus, it was Bexley, the same small suburb of Columbus where I went to junior high school.

Statue of Jerrie Mock at The Works

     More digging uncovered a statue erected at The Works in Newark, Ohio. Newark is about 40 miles East of Columbus. After we moved to the farm near Highwater, Newark became the local 'big city', i.e. where you went if you needed something more than a loaf of bread. I'm not sure why Newark got the statue.

Jerrie's flight path. Joan's flight path.

At the same time that Jerrie was making her flight, Joan Merriam Smith from California was making her own attempt.

Three Eight Charlie - Amazon has one copy of her book available for $500. Phoenix Graphics is selling paperback versions for $18. Kindle doesn't count.

P.S. I was delivering The Dispatch then. Did you see what it said on the front page? 208 pages! I don't think you could get 208 pages if you piled up an entire months worth of The Oregonian.