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Operations Officer Cmdr. Wallace Gaber said that the base continues to try to work with resident complaints about the Growler jet noise. Complaints about low flights are investigated by recorded radar, said Gaber, who added that no Federal Aviation Administration rules have been broken except in the rare case of an emergency.

The base has expressed interest in building a “hush house,” which would muffle some of the on-ground jet engine noise, Nortier said.

And in response to complaints on Lopez Island, pilots have been instructed to keep landing gear up during touch and go operations at Ault Field until they are away from the San Juans and over the water, Gaber said.

Gaber reported that the Navy saw 825 complaints in 2013 made by 289 individual callers and 797 calls made by 283 individuals in 2014.

“What you will see is that a lot of callers are calling more than once,” Gaber said, adding that one individual called 145 times in 2014.

via Whidbey area leaders discuss new squadrons, jet noise – Whidbey News-Times.

If you scroll down to the comments at the Whidbey News-Times, you can make a pretty good guess who called 145 times.

Here’s a little silent film of a Landing Craft, Infantry at Noumea being converted to an LCI(G) gunboat to provide close in fire support for other landing craft.

One of the interesting things is the part where you see the arc welder. Arc welding was still a relatively new technology, and only just coming into widespread use in shipbuilding.  Think about it. There’s a reason we remember Rosie the Riveter, and not Wendy the Welder. In fact, the first all welded hull wasn’t built until the 1920s. World War II actually had a large influence on the adoption of welding for shipbuilding as it was faster, and easier to train shipyard workers for welding than for riveting work.

The success of the field modified LCI(G) gunboats would lead to the production of 130 of the purpose built LCS(L) Landing Craft Support (Large) ships.

The Finns are a proud people, and if they didn’t quite win their 1940 war with the Soviet Union, it wasn’t for lack of guts.

… the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

That quote is by Edmund Burke, who is often credited with the quote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. Whereas the latter has no history in his works, the former does. I read the news this afternoon and found his words once again flashing behind my eyes like a portent of the coming storm. Only in this case we are in the eye, not the outskirts.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and with “Al Qaeda on the run” (not really), a new head of the hydra has sprung from its neck. IS, or ISIS, or ISIL (as our esteemed Prez prefers, since the Levant is important to the Islamic jihadist) has been growing like a contagion in a petri dish. This is not news to anyone paying attention. I am far from a political strategist, but even I can see that these jihadists are beyond dangerous. And today they proved it. ISIS had captured Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh. Jordan for its part threatened severe repercussions should he be harmed or killed: all ISIS prisoners in Jordan would be executed. For a while, the world thought ISIS would pause and reconsider.

They did. Instead of beheading Lt. al-Kaseasbeh, they burned him alive.

via When Bad Men Combine… | Uncivil Peasants.

Aggiesprite brings some righteous thunder.

One of my enduring frustrations with the political left is their insistence that I must respect other cultures uncritically (but absolutely not appropriate from them those good qualities they may possess), and must always in every way criticize and condemn my own culture.

To do so is some sad form of mental illness. One can look upon the history of Western Judeo-Christian culture, particularly our own American culture, and see flaws and missteps, and yet still appreciate that it has been stupendously successful in establishing a society that is far more stable, safe, productive, and compassionate than any other culture in the history of the world.

The Left condemns the entirety of our culture, seeking to overthrow it in pursuit of a more perfect humanity. Somehow, even seeing events such as in the news today, through the lens of the shortcomings of our own culture, never once recognizing the agency of other cultures being flawed, disastrous, and fundamentally at odds with their own vision of a future of peace and harmony. No, whatever evil is visited upon the world beyond our borders must somehow be a direct result of some past (or current) action of our culture, our society.

This hideous act today, this barbarity- this is the normal state of man. The peace and prosperity we enjoy in America, and in like societies, they are the aberration that flies in the face of history.  Our culture works. It builds civilizations. It cures diseases. It feeds the population. It provides safety and security to people far beyond the dreams of the majority of the world’s current population, let alone the humanity of the past.

We have before us such evidence, that our culture is the right, proper way, and yet we today as a society have no courage to proclaim our culture to be the best, to encourage others to join us in prosperity, contentment, peace, and liberty.

And lacking such courage, others step forward, and with the certainty that their culture is dominant, they bring forward misery, hate, death, subjugation, poverty and strife. But they do so with a certainty that they shall  triumph over us. And so their cancer spreads.

It is to weep.

The international order will continue to degrade as the major Western power (USA) continues to disengage thorough official disinterest and faculty room theorizing, and the medium Western powers reach the end phases of disarmament and self-doubt. The growing draw of this vacuum will encourage more and more of the unstable bits in the world will start to wobble and shake.

What is now everyone’s top shelf concern, the Islamic State, was just a few years ago something laughed off as a low probability and probably slightly paranoid “Black Swan.”

via CDR Salamander: Black Swan Tuesday.

‘Phib’s making his prediction for the next war. And I’m not about to bet against him.