An Apt Political Metaphor

A chartered train carrying dozens of GOP lawmakers to a Republican policy retreat in West Virginia struck a garbage truck in a rural Virginia town Wednesday.

Fifty Years Ago

The Tet Offensive was underway.

It was a flawed plan from the start. The North Vietnamese leadership had convinced itself that, if they could fight in the cities, that the people would rise up with them and overthrow the South Vietnamese government. the SVN government was corrupt, brutal and it was run by Catholics in a majority Buddhist country. But the urban dissatisfaction was not enough for an uprising.

The NVA and the VC took the city of Hue, which immediately set themselves up for a mini-Stalingrad, in that they had no sustainable means of being reinforced or resupplied. It took a month to recapture the city, but the outcome was never in doubt.

Where NVN succeeded was in exposing the lies of the Johnson White House, the Pentagon and the generals running MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam). They all had been telling the American people, for years, that the corner had been turned, that the US and SVN were winning, that there was "light at the end of the tunnel." Clearly, there was no such thing. It was a war of attrition in support of a corrupt dictatorship, a fact that was becoming apparent to the American people. What was also coming apparent was the fact that the war couldn't be won, something that was known (or suspected) by most of those running the war and had been known for quite some time.

Tet also gave the South Vietnamese people a taste of what might happen if the North won. The NVA and VC summarily executed thousands of people at Hue. The massacres likely gave rise to the exodus of the boat people. A better government in the south might have exploited that and rallied the people behind it. But that wasn't the government that the South had.

It would take another five years and about 30,000 more American KIAs to end America's involvement in Vietnam.

Visiting Florida Next Week?

You might want to swing by Cape Canaveral:

SpaceX will attempt the first launch of its new giant rocket, the Falcon Heavy, on Feb. 6, the company's CEO Elon Musk said Saturday (Jan. 27).

The much-anticipated maiden flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket will lift off from the historic Launch Pad 39A — the same one used for NASA's Apollo moon missions and space shuttle flights — at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

5 million pounds of thrust lighting off should be spectacular to see. If the damn thing doesn't blow up. 27 engines firing at once would probably make it the largest number of engines burning at one time since the Soviet N1, which never made a successful launch.

Pro Tip for Criminals

By now, one would think that most people would be aware that having your cellphone turned on and with you is a bad idea when you're committing serious felonies.

UPS employees in Springfield, Mo., discovered on Oct. 29 that a number of Beretta firearms had been stolen from trucks on their lot.
...
Authorities also used cellphone-tower records to link five North Texas men to the theft.

I'm guessing that those five guys were the mooks who were hired to do the theft. One or more will roll on whoever supplied the information.

Shorter United Airlines: "We're Sorry That We Kicked You Off the Airplane so You Couldn't See Your Mother Before She Died. But We'll Send Flowers to Her Wake."

It just boggles the mind. At least they didn't have the cops drag her physically from the airplane.

This country essentially has an airline oligarchy. There is not a lot of choice anymore.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is going to le the airlines go back to their past practice of deceptive advertising (for example, fare say "$99 and are $500 once all of the additional costs are tallied up).

And airlines want to ban photography on airplanes. Taking videos of flight attendants abusing passengers or gate agent and cops dragging people off airplanes would be considered to be "interfering with a flight crew member", which is a Federal felony.

The major legacy airlines, now, are cesspits of customer disservice, if not outright evil. If you can get there in a day by driving, you're better off doing that. (Or fly Southwest, for so far, they seem to still be in the "serve the customer" mode.)

Nice Business You Have Here. It'd Be a Real Shame If Something Happened to It

That was, of course, the line that was used to extort money in protection rackets. Fail to pay your "street tax" and a garbage can might be accidentally tossed through your storefront window at 3 AM.

That's basically what the cops are now doing in Detroit:

Businesses pay between $4,000 and $6,000 to join Project Green Light, a program that allows police to monitor businesses’ video surveillance feeds in real time. The cost covers installation of high-definition cameras and lighting. There also is a monthly fee of up to $150 for cloud-based video storage.

In exchange, participating companies are given Priority 1 status on police dispatches — but some business owners who don’t participate feel they’re being treated like secondary citizens.
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Police said they gave 40,471 special attention runs to Green Light locations in 2017 — an average of 111 per day. That represented about 6 percent of all officer runs, according to Detroit police data.

Priority 1 runs are given precedence over other emergency calls, although Craig said Green Light runs don’t trump violent crimes. But per the agreement with the city, if there are simultaneous calls from two business owners reporting similar crimes, police prioritize calls from the Green Light locations.

Smells a lot like an extortion racket to me.

(H/T)

32 On

The Space Shuttle Challenger blew up on liftoff thirty-two years ago today.

The flight of Challenger was a disaster that epitomized expedience over safety.

Bangity; Testing 1, 2, 3.

I stopped by my local range and tried out a M&P Shield in 9mm.

I put fifty rounds through the rental gun. It seemed pretty nice. I kind of like the idea of having a thumb-safety, but if I had one, I'd have to train to work it. One of the issues I've seen with people on a range is that they never drill at working the safety.

Tempting, especially since they can come with an integral laser for not much more.

Your Sunday Morning Jet Noise

The Kawasaki P-1:

International Holocaust Day.

Good thing they sent Rex Tillerson. Trump would have likely commented that "bad things were done on many sides, on many sides."

In Poland, it is now illegal to mention that Poles helped the Germans kill off Polish Jews, or mention that death camps were in Poland.

This is also the anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. NASA has not had much luck with flying spacecraft in January.