Innocent Bystanders

All Gave Some and Some Gave All May 31, 2010

Update: geoff linked this in the comments. It is a tribute to Major Christopher T. Galloway, a special friend of Flopping Aces. God Bless the Galloway family for their sacrifice.

Memorial Day – Arlington (Trace Adkins)

Dave piles on: This, via Andy over at H2

No more bleeding, no more fight,
No prayers pleading through the night,
Just divine embrace, eternal light
In the Mansions of the Lord.

Gentlemen! There’s no fighting in the War Room! May 29, 2010

  In the interest of Peace & Harmony in our little corner of Blogistan, I submit to you.

Derek.

And.

The.

Dominos.

  A little long at the non-Sobek approved length of 9:43, but well worth it.  While you’re listening to it, I’m going to be going upstairs to pull out my “Layla & Other Love Songs” disc and put it in the truck.  Janis is having a garage sale today, and Mo Money and I are going to go do “guy stuff” to keep him out from underfoot.  We’ve got to visit a jobsite, buy him a life jacket at the hardware store, and quite possibly make another lunch visit to Popeyes Fried Chicken. Fun Fun Fun!

  Now, on the same note, here’s a little snippet of a song that will make you want to get some of your friends together, beat the *&%$ out of Billy Bats, stuff him in the trunk of your car, and drive out to the Jersey woods to roll him into a shallow grave.  Enjoy!

IMPORTANT TECH SUPPORT UPDATE:

What’s his name?  Samir Naga…….Naga?  Well, Naganna work here anymore.

Drop in Initial Unemployment Claims Continues to Crawl May 27, 2010

We’re about a week away from the release of the May unemployment figures. They should be interesting, since the initial unemployment claims have been pretty high all month. They just released the initial claims data for last week: 460,000 (they were expecting more like 450,000). You can see from the chart below that the improvement in the employment picture seems to have stagnated lately:

It’s stagnated so badly that my old “How long until employment starts improving” chart is useless. So now I like this chart, which shows that the drop in filings changed dramatically back in November 2009.

Back in November initial unemployment claims were dropping at the rate of 560/day. For the past 6 months they’ve been dropping at 133/day – more than a 4X slow-down.

So our rate of improvement has slowed to a crawl, and I can no longer forecast when we’ll hit the turnaround point. This is entirely consistent with the administration’s pronouncements that job recovery would take years. Which leads one to ask:

Why does this administration, which seeks to intervene in almost every aspect of our lives, think that leaving the job situation to languish is acceptable?

Is Obama Right About Our Nuclear Arsenal? May 24, 2010

Personally, I like having these bad boys in order to scare the shit out of everyone:

If you really piss us off, you're going to regret it.

However, Obama might be right about this.  Drastically reducing America’s nuclear arsenal might make sense, just from the perspective of saving money and dialing down the tension that these arsenals create, according to this article:

THE Pentagon has now told the public, for the first time, precisely how many nuclear weapons the United States has in its arsenal: 5,113. That is exactly 4,802 more than we need.

via Op-Ed Contributors – An Arsenal We Can All Live With – NYTimes.com.

Huh?  A reduction of over 90%?

OK, I realize we are talking about something in the NYT, but the authors are not hippy peaceniks.  They are civilian contractors for the Department of Defense, and they emphatically agree that America must maintain an intimidating nuclear deterrent.  Meaning, we have to be able to scare the shit out of anyone.

The only issue is, how many nukes are needed?

The key issue is survivability in the event that we do not deliver the first strike.  The authors point out that the technology, mega-tonnage of individual warheads, launch platforms, and technology have all changed drastically since the Cuban Missile Crisis.   We still need to be able to destroy anyone, even if we are responding to a first strike.

They say, we need 311 nukes, exactly, to destroy anyone who pisses us off.  These nukes have to be properly deployed on air, submarine, and land-based platforms, with a proper allowance for maintenance downtime.

Check it out.  I don’t know if they are right, but they sound sensible to me. And a hat tip to the NYT for publishing something thoughtful that is not obviously biased towards the lefties.