News In Brief
The “big story” was Rand Paul announces 2016 White House bid
Senator Rand Paul has announced he is launching a 2016 presidential election campaign on the Republican ticket.
“Today begins the journey to take America back,” he said in a campaign event in Kentucky.
He didn’t say how far back, but the 18th century is probably a safe choice.
The latest in an on-going series: Russian nuclear submarine fire ‘put out’ in Arctic dock. They are saying there were no weapons or nuclear fuel on-board as the vessel was in dry dock for maintenance.
In nostalgia news, American Pie lyrics sell for $1.2m. Don McLean auctioned off the original, hand-written lyrics to the song, and said they would explain as much as can be explained about the lyrics. The BBC has an companion piece on the lyrics.
7 comments
I think Russia’s nuclear fleet spends more time burning than sailing. (Ba da BOOM!). And this is the “world power” that we’re supposed to all be cowering in our cupboards about? They’re at best a second-rate regional power now, albeit one armed with nuclear weapons. Which might, or might not, explode if they ever fired them off. And that’s *before* the missiles leave the silo. (Ba da BOOM! again).
As for Rand Paul, I love the fact that he thinks the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was a bad idea because people ought to have the right to discriminate based on race, handicap, or ethnic origin. Yeah, Rand, we got a name for folks who defend bigots, and it ain’t a nice one, just sayin’.
The fire was apparently between the the outer and inner hull, and they put it out by closing the hatches and sinking it. They are assuming that the inner hull doesn’t leak, while the outer hull was apparently open for work. They may be in for a surprise when the raise the dock and open the hatches.
Almost everything they have in a silo is beyond its ‘use by’ date, by decades. I wouldn’t want to be in the area if they attempted to launch given the fuels they used. It would probably do nothing, but with their QC it could blow and set off the warhead at the same time.
I have nothing against libertarians as long as they stop using the facilities, like public roads that were paid for collectively, and never call the police or fire department.
People are free to be just as stupid as they want in private, but they don’t get to impose their stupid on other people. If you want to sell to the public, it has to be to all of the public. You can refuse to sell to individuals, but you can’t refuse to sell to entire classes of people and still pretend you are operating a legitimate business in the public sphere. There are private schools, and private clubs that discriminate, but they can’t expect to receive the public benefits that are given to businesses open to the public.
To be fair, the current US nuclear missile force is not in much better shape. Morale is lower than low. Half the airmen are drunk on duty, the other half are AWOL. The U.S. hasn’t built a new nuclear core in decades, and is managing to keep the missiles theoretically functional only by shipping fuel rods to commercial nuclear power plants to be irradiated to create tritium. Everything’s been outsourced and the budgets cut for everything else in order to siphon money to the outsourcing companies which are generally incompetent at doing everything except billing the government, so who knows whether the work is being done right?
Maybe it’s for the best that the US and Russian nuclear forces are falling apart, given the horror that would arise if they were actually used. On the other hand the problem with that, is that the weapons are nowhere near being secured. A buncha nuns splashed blood on the walls of one of those silos and had to wait a couple of hours for Air Force security personnel to show up to arrest them. If they’d been terrorists instead…
“Take our country back”, cute phrase. repeated so often that its now in the sloganeering domain meaning almost anything to the disaffected.
I want specifics. Who has the country? What are they doing with it that you don’t like? Give me names. I’m sick and tired of “them” or the “poors” getting the blame.
Don McLean was asked once what American Pie meant and his reply was “It means I don’t have to work anymore.”
At one point the estimate was that if either the US or USSR detonated 10% of their weapons at ground level, nuclear winter would result and everyone would be wiped out, even without sending them anywhere. We were on the verge of turning the planet over to the cockroaches for decades.
They shifted the focus to in the military to offense, and anyone on the defensive side, like the missile people, had very limited career possibilities. After years as an elite field, the nuclear force was relegated to a bottom rung support field and the morale left with the prestige.
It is hard for me to accept the amount of fear people seem to feel about a few thousand religious whackoes, after being stationed at the bottom of the Fulda Gap in Frankfurt looking at millions of Soviet and Eastern bloc troops with nuclear weapons. We had ‘terrorists’ trying to blow us up, and occasionally succeeding on a limited scale, but it was annoying, not terrifying. We certainly didn’t expend military resources on what was obviously a civilian police matter.
They can’t do it, Shirt, because facts have a ‘liberal bias’. If you looks at the facts concerning crime in the US, the increasing threat is from police departments, not criminals. Native Americans, I’m sure, would like to take their ‘country’ back, but I don’t think Rand Paul would be in favor of that. The Christianists are disappearing as they have alienated the majority of the young people, and the core is dying out. The fastest growing group is ‘none’ on the question of religion, as people get fed up with the hate messages they hear.
Paul et al. only have ‘dog whistles’ left, and the group that can hear and react to them is diminishing rapidly.
Yeah, that song was certainly a big winner for McLean, and now it has secured the rest of his life with this sale.
My explanation for those lyrics are ‘shrooms.
I hate to admit it, but I understood most of the references as soon as I heard the song. That’s what happens when you come from a background similar to the writer.