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Navy Football’s New Uniform Is AWESOME | Truth Revolt.

Navy’s win is almost a foregone conclusion. But it really is a good looking football uniform.

WarbirdsNews has learned that the National Parks Service has decided to allow divers to visit the Boeing B-29 Superfortress which has lain on the bottom of Lake Mead on the border between Arizona and Nevada. As many WarbirdsNews readers will be aware, divers first rediscovered B-29A 45-21847 following a lengthy investigation in 2001.

The Superfortress crash-landed on the lake on July 21st, 1948. It was involved in scientific experiments with the Upper Air Research Project to study the variation in solar radiation with altitude. The plans required the aircraft to measure the radiation profile from nap-of-the-earth to 30,000′ and back. Flying from Inyokern, California, the crew were performing one of the last scheduled profile flights of the day. They had just descended from the stratosphere, and were leveling out low over the lake, flying at 250knots. Unfortunately, the aircraft’s altimeter had an incorrect setting, and the lake was so smooth and reflective that judging altitude visually proved very difficult. The pilot thought he was at 300′, but he was actually so low that the propellers struck the water’s surface, and struck it hard. Three of the four engines tore from their mounts, while the fourth caught fire. The left wing and empenage received significant damage as well. The crew were able to skip their aircraft back up a couple of hundred feet, but flying on one, damaged engine was not an option, so they carefully set her down, tail first into the water. The bomber floated for a short while, long enough at least for the five man crew to safely take to their life rafts. Then she slipped beneath the rippling water and that was the last anyone saw of her for the next five decades.

via BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES FOR GUIDED DIVING ON SUBMERGED B-29.

We’re running out of B-29s to restore. It would be nice if we could have a material condition survey conducted, and explore the possibility of salvage and restoration. Fresh water should have been a better environment than most.

Air Despatch, air drop, heavy drop or aerial delivery, makes use of a range of specialist equipment such as containers and platforms (pallets) to get stores and vehicles directly to the point of need, quickly, from the air, exploiting one of the characteristics of air power, immediacy.

Air despatch, or air dropping stores, is yet another of those subjects where its history is chock full of British military and industrial innovation but the present is hanging on by the skin of its teeth due to continued budget erosion and changing priorities.

via Military Pallets, Boxes and Containers – Part 7 Air Despatch – Think Defence.

Everything, and I mean everything you want to know about the history and state of the art of aerial delivery of equipment and logistics. This is a very impressive post. Go read.

I don’t really have  a dog in the Army/Navy game. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that Army will lose. And the only thing West Point ever did for me was send me 2nd Lieutenants. Some very good. Some very bad.

But Ronald Reagan’s 1964 A Time For Choosing Speech just keeps getting better and better over the years. Any time someone argues our current President is eloquent, I want to slap some earbuds on them and play this.

They told us that the pilot was dead (and) that he was killed by a Hawaiian during a fight with the Hawaiian, who started to grapple with the pilot, who was holding him at pistol point-blank range. The pilot fired his pistol three times hitting the native in the groin, thus enraging the Hawaiian who grabbed him around the waist and turned him upside down and smashed his head into the ground killing him instantly. The Hawaiian was a 6-foot 6-inch giant and the three shots to his groin apparently didn’t affect him that much. … We then got to inspect all the items they brought back with them. First there was the synchronized machine gun from the fighter plane, then the fish skin water proof wrapping that the pilot had wrapped around his waist … (containing) local maps, money and things necessary if he had to bail out over Oahu. The machine gun still had about twenty bullets hanging from the breach of the gun. I snapped one of the cartridges from the belt figuring it would be a easy souvenir to keep. I asked where was the pilot and they told me that the wounded Hawaiian they brought aboard had killed him and that the natives were going to bury him on the Island. They thought that the stuff they took from him would be enough to verify that he had been taken care of.”

via Pearl Harbor: 5 things you didn’t know about the Coast Guard that day « Coast Guard Compass.

The Coasties in action. And one huge Hawaiian.

On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

via Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism – Telegraph Blogs.

Daniel Hannen is quite possibly the only useful member of the European Parliament.

I think he gives too much credit to his current opposition, and ironically, after telling us to listen to what Hitler said, refuses to hear what his contemporary political opposition says.

But the general theme of his piece is correct.