TIME TRAVEL

I originally found this map at The Arts Mechanical. It's an interesting map that shows the travel time to go from London to anywhere in the world back in 1914. As I looked at the map what struck me was a different map showing how far back in time a traveler would go by traveling from London to, say, Riyadh or Tripoli or Detroit. Those who have traveled to the viler places around the world know how very thin is the veneer of civilization on cultures rooted firmly in a time more than a thousand years removed from today.

IT'S THE SCALE

Europe seemed so big when I studied European History. All of the fraught war and diplomacy of 500 years fits into Texas. It's hard, even now, to imagine European reaction to something fought on the scale of the American Civil War. I don't think 99% of them had any idea. When you wonder where our railroads came from back at the beginning, a lot of them grew out of the logistic demands of armies that moved like locusts from Maine in the north to the Mississippi and to Florida in the south.

MINDLESS SECURITY

After reading about the terror attacks yesterday I was amazed to wake this morning and read in USA Today that the administrator of the Transportation Security Theater Troop was assuring America that not only were his goons on top of the threat posed by terrorists, they were rounding up christian extremists  knew all about the airline terrorists workers laboring away in the bowels of our airport secure areas theft and diversion with terrorist ties and that nobody in all of the TSA gives a damn.

The Transportation Security Administration, which repeatedly screens 2 million airport workers, didn't identify 73 workers potentially associated with terrorism, according to a watchdog report Monday.

"TSA acknowledged that these individuals were cleared for access to secure airport areas despite representing a potential transportation security threat," the 34-page report said.

In its formal reply to the report, TSA said it plans to check workers against the broader database by the end of the year. TSA also disputed missing potential threats in its vetting because the government doesn't provide the agency with all of its watch-list information.

Sooooo, if I understand HLS and TSA, anybody can go on the NO FLY LIST forever for no explicable reason at all, yet the TSA doesn't screen out workers with known ties to terrorists and terrorist connections and keep them out of "secure areas" in our airports.

I don't have a warm fuzzy about that. It reeks of stupidity and incompetence.

ANYBODY SEEN OUR LITTLE CLOCKMAKER

As I looked at the cartoon posted from Last of the Few I wondered, 'what happened to our little muslim clock maker after he left the White House last month? Did he head for Egypt enroute to Qatar and take a vacation at a Red Sea resort where one of his clever little clocks might have gone astray?

Never gonna fly to Egypt again

THE TRUE OPTIMISTS

Today we went to the Steven Udvar-Hazy Center. It was my fourth trip. I learn something new with each visit. Optimists are sometimes nice to have around. They provide comic relief.

Space Shuttle DISCOVERY at the Udvar-Hazy Center

GROUND TRUTH IN RAMADI

Austin Bay provides a little more clarity on what really happened when ISIS overran Ramadi and forced the Iraqi army to retreat. It makes what happened there understandable in the kind of human terms we can all appreciate.

Credit the senior official for setting straight Ramadi's history. Iraqi defenders didn't just bug out. ISIL struck Ramadi in January 2014, six months prior to attacking Mosul. When ISIL's blitz failed, Ramadi became a battle of attrition. For 18 months, ISIL fighters controlled "half the city." Attrition is a euphemism for killed and wounded. Iraqi forces suffered "thousands of casualties" in Ramadi. The briefer mentioned no specifics, but in March and April 2015, Iraq's Ramadi forces beat back repeated ISIL attacks. 

Then the briefer turned to ISIL's assault of May 14: "Over the course of 96 hours in Ramadi, and what we've been able to collect ... (ISIL used) about 30 suicide VBIDs in Ramadi and the environs. ... Ten of them, I've been told, had the explosive capacity of an Oklahoma City type attack. So just to put that in perspective." 

OK, so far. Then this follows: "If you look at the pictures that ISIL has put out of the explosions -- I mean, I have some of them -- it's just they took out entire city blocks."

I don't think American airpower is the answer because that's how we get sucked into pointless and futile wars of attrition. If they mean to cripple ISIS they need to start treating them the way we treated Germany and Japan. Cut off the fuel supply to ISIS controlled territory.

 

RIDING THE RAILS

A few years back my room mate and I used to take the Seoul subway to our offices in Yongsan Main Post. The first couple of times we did it after we arrived we ended up in the damnedest places. We would try to get on pure Korean military installations but never did. What is theirs is theirs. What we share is ours.

I spent a little over two months living in hotels in Seoul that first time and we refused the Army's kind offer of transportation (a bus which appeared at 0530) and decided to test the proof of life by exposing ourselves every single day (we worked @7 days a week) and took the Seoul subways to work.

We had alternate routes. We could amble out, after coffee and breakfast in the Lotte and turn to the left or the right. We mostly went left. I blame that on Reg. He was from Massachusetts and thus a total leftist. We would embark at Seoul Station or City Hall with a transfer or we would sometimes go to the right and take the subway to Itaewon. Either way, we had to walk the last quarter mile or so.

If one got off at Yongsan, the walk took one by Korean Imperial Defense Headquarters (which, soon after, relocated itself out of artillery range of the north Koreans hugging their side of the DMZ with their endless artillery and poison gas shells.) It also let us stroll past the Korean War Museum. If there was ever a museum that had 'one of everything,' it was that museum.

My Coast Guard colleague and I rode the rails underground in a sea of ignorance. The first time, because all the instructions and signs were written only in Korean, we had some trouble but there was an old man to help set us on the proper path. We were wearing our very attractive greenish, black, yellow uniforms of camouflage and he sussed out our desire to go the headquarters of United States Forces in Korea. He got us on the right train despite a very serious language barrier.

I think we took that train for the first month until the young lieutenants convinced us that there was a shorter way to the office. What they hadn't factored was the way that we commuted out of pure ignorance. We had found that if we grabbed a strap on either of the last two undermanned cars of the train that we would not be jammed in like sardines.

Yes, we turned out to be the second worst thing the country team experiences from visitors. We didn't know the last cars on every train are for women only. I know they didn't care at all but maybe it has changed again. We are old reprobates and we would not dream of depriving any lady of a seat on the line. We were just going 4 stops down the line and change. The cars weren't empty but there was absolutely no "inadvertent" brushing, touching, etc. They were mostly empty.

Over the next two decades, the lines got worse. Way. Every train car was packed to maximum capacity. It's a subway. At some point, you cannot add more cars to the train without leaving the rearmost hidden in the tunnel, well away from the platform. The trains took on the aspect of Japanese commuter trains.

It turns out that one can walk for many miles underground in Seoul through the subterranean stores that feature everything from art, belts, sunglasses, bathroom fittings, furniture, clothing... It has to be seen to be believed.

I'll never see it again but it was a really amazing place in the impeccably clean, bright, glistening undergrounds of Seoul. It was like Madrid's in the olden days in terms of clean. Madrid's didn't have any shops and just a handful of buskers.

DRAT

Although nobody was killed or injured this represents a real setback for what remains of our so-called space program. Of course, it being a NASA product, it uses a Russian engine from a country currently under embargo for its behavior in Ukraine.

Why anybody would be surprised to see an American spacecraft with Russian engines explode is a continuing mystery.

LEVITATION AND PFM

Megan McArdle writes some interesting pieces. I usually read the articles of hers I find posted at Instapundit. In this case, she wrote about building hideously expensive but very fast trains in the northeast corridor. She compared many of the factors that lead some fools to believe that they are the American wave of the future.

I simply wonder what happens when one of millions of drivers with a room temperature IQ stalls on the track just in front of a train moving in excess of 100 miles per hour. I suspect that the outcome will not be pretty--or cheap. But never mind the stupid people you see out there driving everyday, think too of the countless Islamic terrorists we have roaming the country at will. They'd use a truck or a bus on the rail, just to be sure and the FBI or ATF will probably arrange financing for it.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait used to have a policy when I lived there that left all wrecks where they ended up after they departed the highways, as displays  of excessive enthusiasm and the penalties for reckless and stupid driving. That, or they were too cheap to hire a tow truck to drive off the road onto the sand to fetch back the tortured chunks of metal and dispose of them.

Ms. McArdle cited the traffic jams that clog the Northeast Corridor and ventures that maglev high speed rail could offer some relief, but not much. I have some cunning alternatives.

- Copy London's policy of only allowing cars into the city after they pay an additional road tax. There will be a blizzard of license plate thefts.

- Go London one better and forbid cars access to the city at all based on whether the car has an alternate or even ending number. Forbid all cars with vanity plates. There will be a blizzard of license plate thefts.

- Follow the socialist models in vogue in western Europe and limit the workweeks to 2 days and 3 days every other week. Motorists are fined if they enter the city on days when they are not working in the city. Your average suburban dweller would be permitted to work 2 days one week, 3 days the next week. Think of the enormous reduction in deadly green house gasses. What could be fairer than that? It's progressive!

Cities, A Place Where Work Gets Done. Entry to the city after 1800 is open and unlimited so people can hang out at theaters, restaurants and bistros.

Win Win!*

*Tongue jammed firmly in cheek.

IS THE TSA SMART ENOUGH TO DO THIS?

It's a fairly simple question so read this and ask yourself what will happen as people who actually have ebola make their way into the already ridiculous airport screening process and need to be taken somewhere after spending hours in a plane and then waiting in a packed customs and immigration line so they can be 'screened' for ebola based on whether or not they originated in West African ports of embarkation.

I don't think there is the physical structure to allow them to do this anywhere in the airports until after they go through customs/immigration and baggage claim areas. I happen to believe that the people in TSA are so ruthlessly uncunning that if some ebola sufferer vomited in the 'screening' room, the TSA would continue to use if for days before a janitor was ordered to thoroughly clean the space. At least customs would put a little "Wet Floor" sign and maybe adjust their endless loudspeaker announcements and include a little, "Don't Step in the Vomit," announcement after they send for the highly skilled janitorial staff to do a bit of cleanup.

In a way it is even more senseless than Sierra Leone's confession that they let the plague get out of control because failed to follow the very simplest and first step in fighting a plague and imposing a quarantine on travel into and out of the effected region. They not only didn't do that, they sent teams of people who have been exposed to ebola to every village in the country to explain about ebola and no doubt left a trail of devastation  in their wake.

AIRLINE FEES TO FIGHT FOR

I was referred to Maddox by Ace of Spades and his referral to a Maddox video about the Fem-Spider Woman Flap. I enjoyed that little video but thought this was more appropriate. I'd be open to the idea of paying some fees that the airlines haven't yet decided to make available. The Delta one in particular. I think Southwest and Frontier should be allowed to sell that fee for punching Delta employees too.

I remember well one Delta gate agent who, in response to all questions asking about any updated information on the long delayed SFO-LAX flight that was already 4 hours late departing SFO one Sunday night, raved at any and all DELTA customers that if they weren't 50 feet away from him in 3 seconds he was calling the cops!!!! I never flew Delta again and its been over 20 years now.

It was an interesting story, as travel on Delta goes. The plane was actually there at the gate for the first 3 hours. Sitting there, waiting for its flight crew who were flying in from Wisconsin or some state like that. They were delayed and delayed by storms. No worries. There's lots of flight crews and sure enough, another flight crew showed up and stole our airplane. They were flying to Texas and since our flight crew wasn't there, Delta swapped their broken aircraft for ours and it flew away.

About two hours later, our flight crew showed up and, checked into a hotel. They had clocked out during the flight and were forced to take crew rest at which point Delta maybe, started looking around for a flight crew to replace them. They actually found one and I saw the pilot walk underneath the plane parked at our gate, come back out from under it and grab a ground staffer by the arm and drag him under. They came out about 5 minutes later and the pilot disappeared. He reappeared a moment later through the jetway door and told the copkaller that the plane would not fly. It was broken.

It took Delta 9 hours to produce a plane and flight crew for us and for the entire time they disdained us all, called the police, ignored us and only that one time when the pilot was there did they actually tell us the truth.

There was a 3rd Class Petty Officer who had duty starting 0700 Monday morning on whatever carrier it was there at North Island. She was moaning in fear as she lamented the terrible things that her Master Chief and ship were going to do to her for being AWOL and worrying about Captain's Mast. I took pity on her, as any of us would, and asked if she had permission to be out of the local area for the weekend and she did. She was on leave. I told her not to worry and said only a nuke would go crazy about an act of the DEvil LTA. I told her to call the ship and tell them what was happening and to relax. There was nothing she could do about the situation. The only other flight was sold out and gone. There were no other flights possible to San Diego until morning.

When I returned to the office in San Diego on Monday, I called in my travel guy and said no more LAX and no more DELTA or I'll be forced to shoot you. I give the Petty Officer a great deal of credit for being able to tell a very real threat from an idle one.

SRSLY?

They're out there stealing passengers now?

What next?

SS SULTANA DISASTER

The worst maritime disaster in the United States happened 149 years ago today when the steamboat SS Sultana with over 2000 souls embarked: exploded, burned and sank in the Mississippi River about 8 miles north of Memphis Tennessee. The boat's passengers included over 2000 Union Army soldiers who had just been paroled from Confederate Prisoner of War Camps in Andersonville and Cahawba. It is estimated that 1700 of these emaciated survivors perished this day when the ship's boilers exploded and sent the burning hulk of the ship drifting down the flooding river.

There is a Kickstarter Campaign active NOW to make a movie about the disaster.

An unrelated documentary about the loss of Sultana

I found this interesting and had forgotten the Sultana until I was researching the Ohio Regiments in the Civil War two weeks ago and found that many of the final musters showed that the soldiers had perished with the Sultana after being captured by the Confederacy. It is hard to believe how they sank out of history with barely a ripple.

FALCON'S NEST

From our DC correspondent.

What does it say about California that somebody stole the tires?

NOTHING BUT AN IRRITATING AND PATHETIC CHARADE

In a remarkable story about a troubled youth who decided to hitch hike to Hawaii, the rest of the press and the Forces of Order gloss over the fact that the teenager breezed through every security measure and precaution at an international airport and stowed away on a passenger plane. Nobody saw a thing.

The useless and really irritating boobs of the TSA were heard to mutter that, "nobody could possibly patrol a fence line that stretches all the way around an airport and keep out trespassers, hijackers, bombs, hideously dangerous 6 year olds, liquids, gels, dangerous toys, grannies, explosives, or penknives." "Not our job!" they said in a loud and declaratory denial of any responsibility.

Perhaps if we all wrote our congressmen and adopted the universal, blame Bush, we could get both the TSA and Homeland Security consigned to a Korean passenger ferry or an Italian cruise ship.

I am familiar with security and securing infrastructure such as aircraft and it can be done. You have to be serious and grown up about it and it doesn't really involve obnoxious and intrusive mashers. You don't ever see those clowns messing with people boarding Air Force ONE, do you? No. You don't. Air Force ONE has security. The rest of the traveling public have theater.

If you gain access to the wheel well of a plane and can smuggle a body onto the plane, how hard is it to smuggle something else onto the plane? It's a good thing there were no drugs involved because under the mislaws of civil forfeiture, the government could steal the plane and send the pilots and flight crew to jail for 25 years for smuggling drugs.

Oh well, it's just another Benghazi moment. Nothing to see. Move along.

METRICS RULE

Measures of performance are what we come up with when we want to examine a process and make it more efficient. In the navy, our higher commands would order us to produce metrics as if they mattered to anybody. My favorite useless metric of all time was something the Air Force called Effects Based Operations. They obsessed like the most rabid weasel you ever saw about metrics that could be used to determine how effective your operations were. When we tried to point out that we were pretty much a static surveillance and security outfit that really didn't have any means to quantify our success except possibly by pointing to a total absence of attacks, we were informed by the most dour and humorless generals on the planet that our head wasn't in the game. It wasn't a game to us.

When the goal truly is process improvement and efficiency it does help to have meaningful metrics. The good folks at FEDEX and UPS came up with a splendid process that they could use to track any package in their network in near real time. They could follow it every inch of the way. Somebody very clever suggested that they let their customers have access to the package movement information. It seemed like a good idea and it did show that both delivery systems were doing a superb job of moving material and getting it where it was sent quickly and efficiently.

A USPS Railway Mail Car when efficiency mattered

The data and the tracking were already there. The information was useful to both shipper and customer and the numbers showed solid performance and good value for the money. You know what happened after that, right? Yes, some bureaucrat decided that the "data" implied good value and integrated the same sort of package tracking in the Unites States Postal Service.

The problem came when the Post Office bureaucrat decided the USPS was in the same business as UPS and FEDEX and chose to provide the customer insight into the USPS process for moving packages. But the Post Office doesn't care about return on investment, shareholder value, earned value management or customer loyalty. I'm not sure what the Post Office perceives as valuable but I know that moving things from point a to point b doesn't fall anywhere near their top 10 list of things the Post Office cares about.

Rural mail delivery screams efficiency

Evidently, the USPS can hire but not fire people. It can hire letter carriers but not clerks. It can buy property but not sell property. It can open post offices but not close post offices. It cannot lay redundant employees off. It has to go to Congress every year to get billions of dollars to stay afloat long enough to pay all post office pensions (forever). Actual timely delivery of the mail or packages doesn't even come within shouting distance of their priorities.

So all that was a lead-in for an old post from elsewhere on the net. I thought it was interesting. His conclusion is wrong in that inefficiency and speed have almost nothing to do with the modern Post Office going broke. That's politics.

Ripped from Watts Up With That

 

QUEEN MARY'S STRANGE HOOD ORNAMENT

I spotted this today at gCaptain.

Queen Mary's captain stands on the leading bulb of the 151,000 ton ocean liner off the coast of Bali.

HOMER SIMPSON SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY

It seems the Vienna Convention didn't have anything to say about astronauts left behind when war breaks out on earth so our diplomats at the UN cobbled up some language they thought satisfied the requirement for rescuing and returning distressed astronauts. They call it the Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space

Joyful Russian Cosmonauts return American Astronaut after Ukraine War Starts

It's a little vague on details.

ADRIFT IN AN IDLE SEA

An interesting note from gcaptain.

The U.K. Maritime and Coast Guard Agency is warning mariners to keep a close watch for shipping containers floating in the English Channel after hundreds of boxes fell from the deck of a Maersk cargo ship last week.

Earlier this week, Maersk Line said that as many as 520 containers had been lost from the deck of the ship as she sailed through the Bay of Biscay on her way to Colombo, Sri Lanka. Maersk Line noted that that 85 percent of the containers were empty and that none of the filled containers carried hazardous materials.

85% of the shipping containers outbound from Europe to Sri Lanka were empty when they washed overboard. Trade takes many forms and there are all kinds of reasons why a country exports containers full of goods and receives back deck loads of empty containers. It doesn't take a master of the dismal science to explain how empty ships can return to overseas ports; there to load goods to take back to the people with money. Spain was once the greatest practitioner of such an arrangement; boatloads of men to the new world on ships that returned laden with nothing but gold and silver.

Spain reaped such a profit on the deal that it became the richest and most powerful country in Europe.

STONERS NOT MORONS

Potheads aren't stupid. The rear echelons in the war on drugs must be filled with amazement that having legalized the use of pot, they still have to criminalize the black market in pot because what kind of an idiot pays $167 per ounce in TAX to the state?

I can see all the states around the pot-legal states passing laws allowing the growth and export of marijuana but not its consumption since that's still against federal law. They may put a 10% tax on each weed transaction in order to get some money themselves and then watch out Colorado! You'll have bandits running weed from the North Dakota border all the way down to Rifle, Colorado.

Can't you see the Colorado law organs pulling over every vehicle at check points on every road and highway leading into Colorado to sniff the cars, one by one. Pretty soon they'll be tunneling into Colorado from New Mexico in order to get passed the border guards and drug detector dogs. They'll be searching every single aircraft and forcing all transiting aircraft to land and be searched so they can assure themselves that they aren't losing good revenue to people who would air drop pot in the great state of legal-weed.

Weed smugglers struggle in the mountains