Wednesday, October 17, 2018

MEET HEATHER SAWYER.

This from September already, must have overlooked it. Via The Political Insider:


"The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing involving Brett Kavanaugh and accuser Christine Blasey Ford has just begun. Chairman Chuck Grassley spoke first, giving an overview of the allegations, and how Democrats have done everything they could to delay Ford’s testimony until today.

After Grassley spoke, Dianne Feinstein took the mic to try to present her narrative, and defend herself against the (true) allegations that she withheld Ford’s letter alleging sexual assault from the Senate until weeks ago. If the goal was to get to the truth of such allegations, you’d think its something Democrats would’ve led with when Feinstein learned of the alleged assault in July. Of course, if the allegations were true and derailed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Republicans would just put forward another nominee. The reason Democrats are trying to delay anything relating to examining these allegations is a desperate attempt to push back a SCOTUS vote until past the midterms (in which Democrats will hope to pick up some seats).

During her opening testimony, Feinstein tried to suggest otherwise, claiming that she held the letter accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct in confidence at the request of Ford. “She wanted this held confidential, and I held it confidential up to a point the witness was willing to come forward…How women are treated in the U.S. with this kind of concern is really wanting a lot of reform.”

But here’s the thing: it’s one of Feinstein’s staffers that made the letter public in the first place. Feinstein staffer Heather Sawyer leaked Ford’s letter to the media in violation of Senate Rule 29(5)."



And who would that Heather Sawyer person be?




Ah... ah... ah...

Oooooo-kay. I understand. Well, cheer up Americans! Your tax dollars at work to pay for the wages - we may assume relatively lavish ones - of stellar, productive, in-dis-pen-sable citizens like Madam Sawyer!


The left. Such a predictable, hopelessly nondiverse bunch.



MFBB.

Monday, October 15, 2018

RECOMMENDED VIDEOS: THE REBEL MEDIA'S JACK BUCKBY ON POLAND.

A lot of bruhaha over the past years - intensifying now, actually - about Poland supposedly being on a slippery path towards a soft dictatorship, what with PiS, the ruling Law and Order party, wanting to implement several changes to the country's constitution.

I admit that I don't know the full extent of all the changes PiS wants in Poland's constitution, other than that rulings of the Constitutional Tribunal - Poland's Supreme Court, so to say - would require a two thirds majority, which sounds actually as if PiS would be making it harder for itself to pass legislation, and that it wants term limits to the Constitutional Tribunal's members. And to be honest, that sounds only reasonable to me. No matter how much I look forward to Brett Kavanaugh serving as a Conservative Judge on the US's SC for at least 20 years to come, I do not think justices should sit on the SC until they drop dead. Same goes for the supreme courts of any country.

Now, the EU Commission, the main instigator of the negative news, is as usual its hypocritic self because in 2015, when PO (the Civic Platform, Polands center left ruling party at the time) wanted to quickly fill up the Constitutional Tribunal with PO-friendly justices right before elections they were basically scheduled to lose, they said nothing. The importance of PO hastily filling the seats before an electoral defeat would have made it impossible, cannot be overestimated, because had they had their way, of the Constitutional Tribunal's 15 justices 14 (!) would have been PO men and women. It's an angle to the story that is com-ple-te-ly underreported. All we hear is that Kaczynski and Co. are new autocrats. So outrageous was PO's move at the time that the new Polish President, Andrzej Duda, refused to swear in these judges.

We are three years further now and PiS continues to try to implement judicial reforms. Without going too much into detail, these reforms have, understandably, their supporters and their detractors. As to whether they constitute a danger to democracy that would, in my opinion, be a serious overstatement. The EU did and said nothing when in 2011 the PO-led government apprehended PO-critical journalists, and suddenly, while nothing like that has happened under PiS yet, democracy would be in danger? It only makes sense if you realize that Poland's PM at the time, PO founder Donald Tusk, has been... Chairman of the European Council, one of the three EU top jobs, since 2014. Tusk is an outspoken EU hack, a fact which was already well known back in 2011. In other words, the EU is only critical vis-à-vis European governments who don't sing their tune - which is a no brainer, of course.

Poland under PiS now pushing through constitutional changes do not seem to me to be any different from a US President using his privilege to nominate SC justices. Obama appointed Sotomayor and Kagan, known for their very leftist stance. As much as I loathe Obama, he used his constitutional right. Now the pendulum has swung and President Trump has appointed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, making the SC majority conservative. How would this be that much different from what's happening in Poland?

Then there's so much consternation about PiS's Media Law. Laughable, if you see to what extent the European governments use their state broadcasters to force leftist narratives on their populations. I live in Belgium, I know of what I am speaking. The State Broadcaster is the regime mouthpiece, basta. And these same governments are now accusing Poland of being... undemocratic? Ridiculous!


Anyway, here's some videos by The Rebel Media's Jack Buckby, who offers an alterative viewpoint to what you find in MSM:











As for Polish youth, dunno. Looks like Buckby got to interview a couple of right stuff guys there, for from what I see Polish youth is relatively laid back. I think I got some right to speak, since I'm married to a gal from Poland and I visit at least once a year. What I notice is that church attendance among youth is in steep decline. And my brother-in-law is as leftist as they get.

On the other hand, there was that gigantic human chain thing to remind Poland of its Christian roots and warn of Europe's islamization. It was a colossal event which did mobilize tens of thousands of youths - unthinkable in Western Europe.

So I think it's indeed still fair to say that 'Poland is not lost yet'.

And may well be, yet another time, Europe's Savior.



MFBB.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

ON THIS DAY IN 1947: CHUCK YEAGER BREAKS SOUND BARRIER.

On this day in 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in level flight. Via Space.com:





His Bell X-1 was a rocket engine–powered aircraft, first conceived in 1944, and designed and built in 1945. In his successful attempt to break the sound barrier, he reached Mach 1.06 (700 miles per hour, or 1,100 km/h), but by no means had the X1 reached its limits, because a year after, it achieved a speed of nearly 1,000 miles per hour (1,600 km/h).

It should be noted that some sources list another man to first break the sound barrier: German test pilot Heini Dittmar, who on 6 July 1944 in Messerschmitt Komet Me 163B V18 would have reached an even higher speed than Yeager, 1,130 km/h (700 mph), but whether he flew high enough to make the flight supersonic is unclear. The speed of sound, commonly referred to as Mach 1, varies with altitude (actually, rather the temperature at particular altitude) and is highest at sea level, where Mach 1.0 equals about 1225 km/h (761 mph). At 30000 ft Mach 1.0 is reached much faster, at 1091 km/h (678 mph). However, German records do not mention a sonic boom during Dittmar's flight, and in any case by that time in the war they probably weren't interested in breaking records.


You can get some idea of what it must have been for Yeager and colleagues to attain hitherto unmatched (manned) speeds in this video clip from the movie The Right Stuff:





The Bell X1's engine was Reaction Motors's XLR11, company designation RMI 6000C4, the first liquid-propellant rocket engine developed in the US. It used ethylalcohol and liquid oxygen as propellants and generated a maximum thrust of 6,000 lbf (27 kN). Each of the four combustion chambers produced 1,500 lbf (6.7 kN) of thrust. The XLR11 was not throttleable but each chamber could be turned on and off individually. At the 0:18 mark in the video above you see the character playing Yeager turning all four of them on simultaneously. One wonders about the shocks to the structure and the implications of the asymmetrical thrust in case of individual turning on and off. I suppose that when using only two of the four, pilots were advised to use either the horizontally arranged thrusters or else the vertical ones. (It should be noted that the engine powering the Me163, the Walter HWK 509, could be throttled).







Pending development of a more powerful engine, in 1959 and 1960, a pair of XLR11-RM-13's mounted on top of one another were used as an interim power plant for the first X-15's. These XLR11's were boosted to 2,000 lbf (8.9 kN) of thrust per chamber for a total of 16,000 lbf (71 kN = 2 x 4 x 8.9kN).




In NOV 1960, the combination was replaced by a single XLR99 engine, but at 67kN it produced actually less thrust than the 8 combustion chambers of the two XLR11's:




MFBB.