Kerbal

This link talks about going to another planet.
http://imgur.com/a/ttW9p#2

Has good pics and a nice walk through... check it out

Try Me

http://www.stefanom.org/spc/#  World Creator

Looks like a great idea

Do me... this will be great

watch this

watch this:

DougM in comments

Dem Rep Schakowsky: “Americans don’t deserve to keep all of their money”

Dem Rep Schakowsky: “Americans don’t deserve to keep all of their money”:

Dem Rep Schakowsky:”Americans don’t deserve to keep all of their money.” “I’ll put it this way. You don’t deserve to keep all of it and it’s not a question of deserving because what government is, is those things that we decide to do together.” We’ll put it this way: National Defense, police, fire, etc, YES. Porkulus I and II, Solyndra, GM, ObamaCare, NO. Self-serving hacks like Schakowsky have for too long obfuscated the line between spending on what the public truly NEEDS and spending on what the political class wants to give us (and which enriches THEM.) We want to cut the FAT (and the FAT-HEADS) and leave the muscle.

“The President is beginning to be a parody of himself.”

“The President is beginning to be a parody of himself.”:

“The President is beginning to be a parody of himself.” Newt Gingrich guests with Laura Ingraham and notes that President Obama is beginning to sound like a parody of himself. While that may be true, no one’s laughing at this parody. No one.

Drift: How This Ship Became a Floating Gitmo

Drift: How This Ship Became a Floating Gitmo: "

This is the U.S.S. Boxer. A big-deck amphibious assault ship, the “Golden Gator” displaces about 40,500 tons and provides a working home for more than 2,000 troops. Recently, its brig held a less likely passenger, Danger Room has confirmed: Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali whom the United States just charged with supporting al-Shabaab and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

But if Warsame’s case is the future of terrorism detentions, that’s going to be a problem. The Navy simply doesn’t have enough ships with the brig space to serve as a floating Guantanamo Bay.

Out of the Navy’s 286 ships, only its 11 aircraft carriers and 10 big-deck amphibious assault ships really have brigs to lock up potential dangerous detainees. Its destroyers, cruisers, subs, frigates and littoral combat ships lack the space necessary to operate more than a makeshift brig. They also lack the guards and medical support personnel to detain someone for months, as in Warsame’s case.

“When someone is confined on surface ships,” explains retired Rear Adm. Ronald Christenson, a former commander of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, “they’ll transfer him almost immediately to a big ship that does have a brig, or shore facilities that have those qualifications.” And an aircraft carrier’s brig is only big enough for about “six to ten” detainees, Christenson adds.

Of course, in a pinch, the Navy has workarounds. In February 2009, the Navy placed 16 captured pirates aboard the supply ship Lewis and Clark, where about 20 Marines were tasked with guarding the mostly docile buccaneers. The Navy called the arrangement a “temporary holding facility” en route to depositing the detainees at a Kenyan pirate court. Ironically, after the Lewis and Clark ceased holding its detainees, pirates chased it in May 2009.

“Even though [smaller] ships have this ability, if you want to have a real prison, you need a larger ship,” says Eric Wertheim, who edits the authoritative Combat Fleets of The World for the U.S. Naval Institute. “Also, you have to look at what ships are need for other duties, and how it affects the main mission of the ship. If it’s a small ship, and you’ve got a lot of [detainees], it’s gonna have a big impact.”

Problem is, the way the Obama administration is drifting, the fleet is shaping up to be default jailers in the war on terrorism.

Last week, Vice Adm. William McRaven, the next head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, testified that ever since the Obama team effectively barred detainee transfers to Guantanamo Bay, terrorist suspects taken captive outside Afghanistan or Iraq would be briefly held aboard “a naval vessel.”

As it turned out, McRaven secretly already had Warsame detained in precisely that manner, according to Warsame’s indictment in federal court. Warsame, intercepted in the Gulf of Aden, had been floating out there for more than two months; Danger Room isn’t sure how much time he spent on the Boxer, whose crew did not return an e-mail seeking comment. (The Boxer’s involvement was first asserted by Danger Room pal Raymond Pritchett, but we confirmed it independently.)

McRaven wasn’t exactly happy about it. He urged the Senate Armed Services Committee to keep some long-term terrorism detention facility open, Gitmo or no Gitmo.

It’s not hard to see why McRaven wouldn’t be pleased. It’s not just that most of the fleet isn’t equipped for the detention mission. It’s that the whole enterprise is an improvised, stopgap measure. Since special operations forces snatch missions are classified, they surely involve keeping most of a ship’s crew in the dark, all while diverting resources from its main mission. Then there’s the complexity of getting experienced interrogators flown out to see to pry information out of the detainee.

And hovering over everything is the legal ambiguity and the potential for a PR or human-rights disaster. Obama administration lawyers couldn’t tell reporters why detaining Warsame was legal. The Joint Special Operations Command is still smarting from its detainee abuse scandal at Iraq’s brutal Camp Nama, and there are reports it runs secret jails in Afghanistan, too. Uncertain legal authorities, inappropriate facilities and seat-of-the-pants planning for detentions is a recipe for something going very, very wrong.

There’s reason to suspect that Warsame isn’t the last detainee held on a ship. After a U.S. drone strike on Shebaab targets in Somalia on Friday, the country’s defense minister said that commandos “retrieve[d] the bodies of dead or wounded militants.” Obama officials deny it, but there could be other Warsames in Navy brigs.

It’s either ironic or tragic: Obama’s opposition to Guantanamo Bay has led to precisely the kind of ad hoc, legally murky detentions that created so many problems at Guantanamo. Now the Navy and special operations forces are effectively holding the bag.

Even on the large ships that have brig space for detainees, Christenson says, “extended” detentions — “a month or something” — are very rare. “They’ll transfer them to shore, get them in a big facility,” he says. “They don’t want to keep someone in a ship’s brig for a long time.” Unless Obama can reverse the drift of his detentions policy, they might have to.

Laughing at the UN, not with it: North Korea chosen to chair UN disarmament conference

Laughing at the UN, not with it: North Korea chosen to chair UN disarmament conference: "

The UN is so daffy it would make news the day it didn’t say or do something stupid. Unfortunately, today is not that day. The Weekly Standard relates another “dog bites man” UN story:

"Slap me naked," Kim Jong Il said, "if the U.N. ever takes my country seriously."

… the United Nations again made itself an international laughing stock… by appointing North Korea chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Senator John Kerry [has said North Korea]…has “twice tested nuclear weapons…is developing missiles to carry them…has built facilities capable of producing highly enriched uranium for more nuclear weapons” and has defied a U.N. arms embargo by exporting weapons and sensitive technologies to rogue regimes. 

A UN idea so stupid even John Kerry noticed? Not quite.

Alas, Senator Kerry is also one of the lead champions of the United Nations in the Senate. According to the U.N., “The Conference is funded from the UN regular budget, reports to the General Assembly and receives guidance from it.”

If North Korea uses that kind of guidance in their missles, they’ll end up hitting Pyongyang.

The UN is composed of folks with funny names who eat expensive food, basically a bunch of Barack Obamas. There’s gotta be some fancy thinkin’ behind this, right?

North Korea assumes the Conference chairmanship by being the next state in the alphabetical rotation of the 65 members, which include five nuclear weapons states and 60 other countries such as Iran and Syria.

Great, stupidity is on auto-pilot at the UN. What else can go wrong?

…American taxpayers… foot 22 percent of the [UN’s] bill…

Budget hawks, here’s some dead meat to feed on.

- Written by Bonfire of the Absurdities

Theory adjustment time: The same Chinese pollution that causes global warming also causes global cooling

Theory adjustment time: The same Chinese pollution that causes global warming also causes global cooling: "

It’s almost funny. No, it is funny. Very damn funny, in fact. One might even say uproarious.

The same global warming fanatics who told us that burning coal is one of the main causes of global warming are now explaining away a decade of cooler temperatures by blaming it on – you guessed it – burning coal.

Better get yourself a sweater. The Chinese are burning more coal.

The BBC manages to explain it all without even cracking a smile:

The lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008 was mainly caused by a sharp rise in China’s coal use, a study suggests.

The absence of a temperature rise over that decade is often used by “climate sceptics” as grounds for denying the existence of man-made global warming.

But the new study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that smog from the extra coal acted to mask greenhouse warming.

Aha! It must be true because it says so in a study. A study presented in a journal with a very long name. That’s good enough for us and we’re confident that it’s good enough for any reasonable person.

China’s coal use doubled 2002-2007, according to US government figures.

Although burning the coal produced more warming carbon dioxide, it also put more tiny sulphate aerosol particles into the atmosphere which cool the planet by reflecting solar energy back into space.

In other words, the problem is also the solution. If it’s warmer, it’s the result of burning coal. If it’s getting cooler, it’s the result of burning coal.

Global warming theory is like one of those Snuggies you see advertised on late night TV – one size fits all.

Source: BBC

First (Commercially Available, Street & Sky Legal) Flying Car Is Cleared For Takeoff!!!1

First (Commercially Available, Street & Sky Legal) Flying Car Is Cleared For Takeoff!!!1: "

Cleared for takeoff -- get it?! Because that's what they do to planes at the airport or whatever SHIT I DON'T KNOW, I'M NOT A TERRORIST. So yeah, the Terrafugia Transition flying car -- literally, a car with folding wings than can fly, has received the last approval necessary to be delivered to pre-orderers sometime next year. *considers moving to a 1st floor apartment*

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently granted special exemptions for the Transition 'roadable aircraft.'


The NHTSA stipulations involve the type of tires and windscreen the Transition will use as a land vehicle. The tires are rated for highway speeds and the windshield will be made of polycarbonate materials instead of automotive safety glass to save weight and prevent shattering in a bird strike.

Terrafugia says the Transition, which notched its maiden flight in 2009, is 'the first (light airplane) to incorporate automotive safety features such as a purpose-built energy absorbing crumple zone, a rigid carbon fiber occupant safety cage, and automotive-style driver and passenger airbags.'

Sure it's a step in the right direction, it's just not a very big one. It's like baby stepping up to a crack to avoid breaking your mother's back when you should be leaping over that shit with gusto. So, yeah, a crappy car when you're driving it, and a crappy plane when you're flying it. The future, ladies and gentlemen -- the future!

Buckle up! Terrafugia flying car approved for roads [cnet]

Thanks to Becca and Pat, who are all 'George Jetson or GTFO'. Hey I'm with you."