Swamp Musings

"Beware of altruism. It is based on self deception, the root of all evil."

"Being generous is inborn; being altruistic is a learned perversity. No
resemblance--"

"If tempted by something that feels "altruistic," examine your motives
and root out that self-deception. Then, if you still want to do it,
wallow in it!"

- Robert Anson Heinlein

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Good old Bob. I didn't realise until after his death that I had lived less than 50 miles from him for nearly 7 years. I'd loved to have met him. We lost another good 'un yesterday with the death of Frank Kelly Freas, the artist.

The purpose of the quotes was kind of a dig at the endless harping I've heard from the MSM about how selfish Americans are in this tsunami aftermath. Libs seem to just love depreciating the US. T'ain't true McGee. The one thing I do fret is how our aid will be used. Obviously the aid provided by our military will be extraordinary (as usual) but through other agencies, well, how would YOU like to be "assisted" by the UN? Hey, maybe we can finally get them moved to Fangataufa now so they can be nearer the sites that need them! OK, I'll be nice. They can move to someplace more civilized like the Democratic Republic of Congo where they've already got a good start doin' things they're good at.

Neal Boortz is just back from Christmas vacation and he had a lot to say on this subject. His excellent rantings for today, Jan 3, haven't been permalinked yet so if you want to read them, just click the link on the right and navigate the archives to the date if you're reading this after tomorrow morning. He has a photo on the bottom of that post you should see. Gives one a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Visualizing the areas impacted by the 16-20 foot waves is greatly improved by viewing this Sumatra earthquake animation from some outfit called the International Oceanic Commission. The animation is 645 KB so it's not too bad if you're on dial-up.

150,000 dead people is a huge disaster. That represents 0.009% of the approximately 1.6 billion people in the affected nations and around 32 hours of their people production. It's a heck of a lot higher than the 0.00072% of the population of Florida that were killed by this year's hurricanes, mostly we just took a $42 billion kick in the teeth unless one of yours was part of that tiny percentage. Messes can be cleaned up, "stuff" replaced and rebuilt.

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How 'bout another aviation site? Back in the mid-60's I was at an airshow that had a B-58 on display. I got to climb into the cockpit and my first thought was "hey, this fits!" I was just a kid back then and at my tallest many years ago, was 1/8" shy of 5' 5" so you can imagine there wasn't a lot of room in that craft! Here's a good site and I recommend the "Crosswind Landing Attempt" quicktime movie to be watched before your next commercial flight and "Supersonic Shockwave" for a bit of badass boogie. Both are tiny files. The funnest parts are the audio files linked under "Wild Blue Yonder". I'll let you judge for yourself!

THE B-58 “HUSTLER”