XBradTC

Oh, dear me, how I could have used one of these when setting up a 3km long triple strand concertina wire obstacle.

He is virtually unknown to Americans today, though he appeared in 65 movies and was the only actor to become an ace during World War II.  Born in Los Angeles in 1914 to Nebraskan Bert DeWayne Morris and Texan Anna Fitzgerald, he would be christened with his father’s name but go by Wayne Morris.  While attending Los Angeles City College, he began acting at the Pasadena Playhouse.  Handsome, blond, blue-eyed, and 6'2", he was a striking figure.  Succeeding wonderfully in a Warner Bros. screen test, he signed a contract with the studio and debuted in the role of the navigator for the trans-Pacific flight in China Clipper (1936).

Warner Bros. kept Morris busy with bit parts in six more movies during 1936-37 before he was cast in the principal supporting role in the western Land Beyond the Law (1937).  Then came his title role in Kid Galahad (1937).  Teamed with studio heavyweights Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart, Morris played an innocent and naive young boxer to perfection.  The movie was both a critical and a box-office success.

via www.chroniclesmagazine.org

An interesting little biography.

Someone mentioned the old Jan Michael Vincent movie Tribes in the comments the other day. Guess what? It’s on YouTube. I started watching last night, but fell asleep about half way through.

You failed.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wants the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to prohibit organizations from “saying whatever they want about Washington policy debates,” according to a letter she sent to the agency on Thursday.

Warren sent a letter to SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White calling for an investigation into alleged discrepancies between statements insurance executives made to their investors and complaints these same individuals made about the impact new government regulations would have on their businesses, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The new regulations stem from a Department of Labor rule change that will make it tougher for investment firms that handle retirement funds to operate.

via thefederalist.com

As ever, the Democratic party partners with the entrenched bureaucracy to weaponize the government against the governed.

Which, having foreign air forces participate is hardly unusual. And the USAF has trained with and against the Su-30 before. Just thought it looked neat.

https://twitter.com/Chopsyturvey/status/716527115756240896

One wonders just what ROE and scenarios they’ll be working. Our friend Robin is simulating a variety of scenarios with an array of variables to see how the F-15 stacks up against the Su-30. So far, the F-15 seems to have a touch of an edge, but it is hardly one sided.

On an unseasonably warm spring afternoon, about 15 members of the same Navy squadron pulled up to a house on Barrington Drive in Oak Harbor, armed with enough manpower and lawn equipment to tackle a city park.

They came to lend a hand and build camaraderie, but mostly to lift spirits.

“One of our shipmates has fallen ill and is unable to keep up his lawn,” said Cody Hughes, president of VAQ-129 First Class Petty Officers Association at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island.

“As a First Class association, we took it on ourselves to get together and come out here and clean up his lawn and get it to where it’s manageable.”

via www.whidbeynewstimes.com

That, my friends, is camaraderie of a type you will not find outside the service.

I think it was Spill that reminded me of this classic.  In an age where we routinely see FLIR video of fighters engaging ground targets from thousands of feet of altitude, and from miles away, it’s jarring to see jets flying napalm drops at 50 feet.

Every damn time I pulled the trigger, the target died. Not by me, but hey, they died.

From Defense Tech, way to bury the lede:

The U.S. Navy’s variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter recently launched its first 1,000-pound GPS-guided bomb known as the Joint Standoff Weapon, or JSOW.

The Lockheed Martin Corp.-made F-35C conducted the exercise March 23 at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, according to a statement released Thursday from the F-35 program office.

Well, eventually, the guys at Pax are going to be dropping a whole lot of different weapons, different ways, to certify the F-35C to carry the full array of weapons.  But bombs do weird things in the boundary air around a jet, especially when dropped from bomb bays, so you have to test for separation a lot.

No, the real news in the article is this:

The latest version of the technology, known as the JSOW C-1, adds a weapon datalink radio and modified seeker software for anti-surface warfare operations. The newer version is the world’s first network-enabled weapon with a range of more than 100 kilometers (62 miles), according to its manufacturer.

Much at the land attack variant of the Tomahawk missile has demonstrated an anti-surface warfare capability via a “synthetic” seeker by updating target location via data link, JSOW will also be gaining this capability.  And just about anything that increases the number of different types of weapons the Navy can use in the anti-surface role is a good thing.