Blue Stephen

とんでもないものを見た気がして慌てて引き返した

@MAXIMUM_ODEN j'ai beaucoup aimé les films de Louis de Funes les "gendarmes". En 1982 avec la religieuse en 2 CV je pense que c'est "Le Gendarme et les Gendarmettes" (le Gendarme et "les femmes gendarme" :)

映画「ルイ・ド・フュネスの大奪還」1982。ルイ・ド・フュネスのサントロペ（憲兵）シリーズ第六作。ルイ・ド・フュネスの遺作である。フランス本国でこのシリーズは興収1〜4位を獲得。スピード狂のクロチルド修道女が毎回爆走wシトロエン2CVのカーチェイスは見応えあり👍

@deejaymatu @Turbinetraveler Chuckle...

@Turbinetraveler Aterrizar...es una manera de decirlo.

Mexican Navy helicopter crash lands just after takeoff in Mazatlan, Sinaloa.

Never in my lifetime has it been so easy to guess who the retard on the Supreme Court is. I have a theory that Ketanji Brown Jackson is actually pushing the court to the right because her opinions are so dizzyingly stupid that none of the Justices want to be on the same side of an opinion with her.

Almost every banana in your supermarket is a clone of the same plant. And that plant is dying. The Korean pack works because of how bananas talk to each other. Bananas release a gas called ethylene as they ripen. That gas drifts. Nearby bananas pick it up and start ripening too. Put seven bananas in a bowl and within a day or two, the whole bowl goes brown. The Korean pack ducks this by selling bananas at different stages, so each one ripens on its own. The banana in your kitchen is called a Cavendish. Around 99% of bananas exported worldwide are this same variety, and they're all clones. Cavendish bananas don't grow from seeds. Every plant is grown from cuttings, all the way back to a single Cavendish from the 1830s. Your morning banana is a genetic copy of the bananas your grandparents ate. The same thing happened 70 years ago, to a different banana. Until the 1950s, the world's banana was a variety called the Gros Michel, or "Big Mike" for short. People said it tasted better than today's banana. Then a soil fungus called Panama disease swept through the world's banana farms. It killed the roots. There was no cure. By 1961, the industry had given up on Big Mike. The Cavendish happened to be immune to that strain of the fungus, which is why it took over. A new strain of the same fungus has now emerged. It started in Asia in the 1990s and has been spreading. Cavendish has no defense. Sprays are useless. The fungus can sit in the soil for decades, waiting for a banana plant to grow back. It hit Mozambique in 2013, Colombia in 2019, Peru in 2021, and Venezuela in 2023. In late 2025, it was confirmed in Ecuador. Ecuador grows about one in every three bananas the world exports. So yes, the Korean pack is smart. But the bigger banana problem is that the entire global supply is on the same road Big Mike was on in 1955.

“Most people who read ‘The Communist Manifesto’ probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of ‘the workers.’” — Thomas Sowell

@TomANelson Lil history lesson and observation goes a long ways Tom! Shame people won't take the time to do it! 🤔

@TomANelson @_ClimateCraze Apparently, you didn't getbthe memo. It's only weather if it doesn't fit the narrative. Then again, I've heard warming causes cooling. So, there you go...

February 2003: Hugo Chávez fires 18,000 PDVSA employees in a single day. He eliminated petroleum engineers, geologists, refinery technicians, and the guy who actually knew how to keep the Paraguaná Refining Complex running without blowing it up. Chávez replaced them with loyal party members who couldn't distinguish crude oil from chocolate milk. PDVSA used to be the crown jewel of Latin American state enterprises (which tells you something right there). The company refined 1.3 million barrels daily in 2002 and exported expertise to other oil nations. Then Chávez decided that technical competence was less important than revolutionary fervor. By 2019, Venezuela was importing gasoline from Iran to fuel its own cars while sitting on 300 billion barrels of proven reserves. You can't redistribute knowledge the way you redistribute wealth. When Chávez's government chased away the engineers, they took decades of accumulated expertise to Calgary, Houston, and Aberdeen. The new managers learned this the hard way when refineries started exploding—literally. The Amuay refinery blast in 2012 killed 48 people because nobody left in charge understood basic safety protocols. Today you'll find Venezuelan petroleum engineers designing fracking operations in North Dakota while their homeland rations gasoline like it's 1943. The oil stays in the ground because socialism created a country that forgot how to drill holes and turn crude into something useful.

ベトナムでT-62が発砲&射撃後の空薬莢を砲塔後部の小ハッチから自動的に排出しているところ。実際には砲身の仰角を最大にしないと機構が作動しないとか、ハッチが開くと砲塔部に開口部ができてNBC兵器対策だめじゃんとか問題があった。

A United 767's landing gear just punched through a bakery truck driver's window on the New Jersey Turnpike. Here's the part the media isn't telling you. This was a 75-year-old infrastructure decision finally cashing in. The chain was set in motion before any pilot showed up to work today. Newark Airport opened in 1928 on New Jersey farmland. When the New Jersey Turnpike was routed in 1951, the cheapest path ran along industrial land that was already developed, which put the highway within feet of the airport boundary. Every other major US hub has a buffer zone between active runways and public roads. Newark traded its buffer for capacity in the Truman administration. Nobody alive made that decision, and nobody alive is going to undo it. That single 1951 routing is why Runway 29's threshold now sits directly over the southbound Turnpike, lined with 40-foot light poles and active truck traffic. Now play that geometry forward. Wind shifted at Newark today. One change closed the two long runways and pushed every arrival, including a 350,000-pound 767-400 fresh off an 8.5-hour transatlantic from Venice, onto the short runway. Runway 29 is 6,725 feet. A 767-400's minimum runway is 6,000 feet. With that little margin, you cannot land long. The crew has to put the gear down on the aim point or the plane runs off the end. Robert Sumwalt, former NTSB chair, told CBS he assumed the pilots were intentionally flying low on final so they didn't land long. That is textbook procedure for a heavy on a short runway. The system worked exactly the way it's designed to work. Flying low on final to Newark Runway 29 means crossing the New Jersey Turnpike at the altitude of a 40-foot light pole. The tire clipped one. The pole came down on a Schmidt bakery truck heading to a Newark depot. The driver, Warren Boardley, got cut by flying glass when a 767 landing gear assembly came through his driver's-side window. He has been released from the hospital. The 221 people on the plane never knew it happened. Newark has been on borrowed time for 75 years. The wind decides which day the bill comes due.

The French Dorland Gyroplane G.20 was a creation of the 1930s, as can be seen in the diagram, with 'novel' defensive machine guns! Work on the prototype was halted by WW2, with a (much modified/unarmed) aircraft being built post-war. It underwent ground tests, but never flew.

Everyone loves asking: “If Grant was such a great general, how come he lost nearly every battle to Lee and suffered way more casualties?” Robert E. Lee himself had a very different answer. “I have carefully searched the military records of both ancient and modern history, and have never found Grant’s superior as a general. I doubt his superior can be found in all history.” — Robert E. Lee The entire question is built on two flat-out falsehoods. First: Grant didn’t “lose nearly every battle.” There was essentially ONE continuous campaign — from the Wilderness in May 1864 straight through to Appomattox in April 1865. Grant seized the initiative in the very first clash and never gave it back. Lee spent the rest of the war reacting to Grant’s moves. When Lee attacked in the Wilderness hoping the old forests and bogs would save him (like they always had), Grant didn’t retreat north like every previous Union commander. He simply disengaged, slid south, and flanked Lee again. Lee never dictated the terms of battle after that day. James Longstreet had tried to warn the Army of Northern Virginia: “We’ve never faced anyone like this man.” They didn’t listen. They learned fast. Second: The casualty comparison ignores that Lee was almost always the defender. Context matters. But the deeper truth is bigger than any single clash. Lee still fought war the old way — disconnected battles, win-loss record like a sports season. Grant fought the next war: coordinated campaigns across multiple theaters, using railroads, telegraph, navy, and engineers to keep relentless pressure until the enemy simply could not continue. Grant didn’t win by accident. He made contact and maintained it until victory was inevitable. Lee fought the last war. Grant wrote the blueprint for the next one. That’s why he was great. That's why he won. Change your mind yet? Drop your hottest take on Grant vs. Lee below. 🔥

More thoughts on landings: I went to the Reserves & got re-qualified as a KC-10 instructor after a couple years away from the jet. The DO (Director of Operations) assigned me to fly w/ the Wing Commander, who flew jets occasionally now & had only a weird “Senior Staff” Qual in the KC-10. Long story. Anyway, the DO gave me a warning. He phrased it in a nice way, but told me they only allowed certain instructors to fly w/ the Wing Commander. It piqued my curiosity, but I didn’t go on high alert or anything. So, we’re on the last landing of the sortie, really late at night. Things look fine, he’s doing fine, and I’m happy we’re almost done. Somehow in the last 100’, this guy manages to put the jet down almost in the lights leading up to the runway. I’ve never seen anything like it & couldn’t explain it. It was like the universe paused, reset our height above the ground, then resumed play. We touched down on the main gear maybe 50’ from the runway threshold. I didn’t have time to react. I realized we were safe & stopping, so didn’t say anything. I didn’t debrief him, either…he wasn’t going to listen to me anyway. I tried to figure out how that happened. I honestly never did. I didn’t see any yoke movements or power adjustments that would account for it, nor was there any weather that would do it. We were on speed & glidepath. I still don’t really know. Anyway, I talked to the DO the next day. He wasn’t surprised, and reiterated that was why they only let him fly with a handful of instructors. I flew with him again, and it was vanilla, but I watched like a Hawk. That lesson sticks with me. Fast forward to years later, and I haven’t actually flown the KC-10 in a long time. I’m not current & so my qualification has lapsed. I hear my son on a video game group chat telling others something along the lines of “yeah, when my dad retires I get to wave the jet in to parking”. Shit. The kids are expecting that. I was just going to go away quietly…I had a lot going on in those years. A lot. I didn’t have the bandwidth for the KC-10, but now there is an expectation & I can’t let them down. So, the squadron goes to extraordinary lengths & draws up a whole requalification plan for me, which has to be signed at multiple levels. In reality, it’s just to do one last flight, and not even do much flying. The squadron was extremely gracious in this regard. My instructor, a good friend of mine, offers me the last landing. I’ve strapped into the seat for this one…I’d been napping in the back while the other pilots took turns practicing touch & gos for their currency. I considered it, but the jet – which I had thousands of hours on – felt huge now & I was uncomfortable. I declined & put my hands in my lap. He landed & slowed it down. I took over to taxi it in for my kids, and then we had the whole show of throwing water on me, champagne & pictures. And that was it. That was my last landing in a military jet.

True Size of NASA’s Lunar Module: Smaller Than You Think, Braver Than You Imagine At first glance, it looks almost comically fragile — like a shiny aluminum spider with foil skin and toothpick legs. But that’s the illusion.This is the Apollo Lunar Module (LM), the only vehicle in history that carried humans to the surface of another world.Standing just 7 meters tall (about the height of a two-story house), it was built as light as possible because every extra kilogram had to be blasted off the Moon again. Fully fueled, it weighed around 15,100 kg — yet that mass included everything needed to land, survive, and return.It never had to fly through air or fight wind. In the vacuum of space and the Moon’s gentle gravity (1/6th of Earth’s), it could afford to look delicate. Those thin struts and gold-colored mylar blankets were masterpieces of engineering — tough enough to survive the harsh lunar environment while staying feather-light.Its four landing legs spread wide for stability on the unknown, cratered surface. Above them sat a tiny ascent stage, barely big enough for two astronauts to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in their bulky spacesuits. No seats. No luxury. Just the absolute minimum space required to operate controls, sleep in shifts, and stay alive.And somehow, this delicate-looking machine did the impossible:Land softly on the Moon Support two explorers for days Carry a folded Lunar Rover on some missions Blast off again using its own engine Rendezvous perfectly with the Command Module in lunar orbit All of it 240,000 miles from Earth, with no second chances.When you truly grasp its size and what it achieved, the Lunar Module stops looking “too small.” It starts looking like one of the greatest feats of engineering and courage in human history.Still think it looks too flimsy to land on the Moon? Think again.

Part Two. 2) As fate would have it, and timing is everything, that same morning, I was the first appointment on Clinton’s schedule. It was 7:00 AM and I was there to update him on our nuclear plans and answer any questions he might have. As I walked into the Oval that morning, I saw Clinton seated at his desk, his head in his hands and his eyes bloodshot. I knew it was not going to be a happy day in the White House, so I asked him if I should come back later. He said, “Yes.” As I was leaving, I turned and asked him to confirm he had the nuclear codes with him. It was standard procedure and a national security safety check. He confessed to me he’d lost them. I was dumbfounded. And he even couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d last seen them. Never happened before, hasn’t happened since. As I drilled down, it turns out that, for a period of time, days, weeks, or months, who knows, Clinton didn’t have the necessary codes and didn’t tell anybody about it. And he didn’t care. He was a neutered president because of his affairs. He appealed to me to not let the media know. I told him I wouldn't (and I didn’t until I retired from the military and wrote “Dereliction of Duty”). When I contacted the Pentagon, they were speechless. It had never happened before. Being the American military, they immediately hopped to and reproduced new codes that were then required to be disseminated not only to President Clinton but also to every military nuclear arm (missiles, submarines, and bombers). No easy task but they got it done. Initially, as you recall, Bill denied Monica publicly. Hillary blamed the “right-wing conspiracy.” Eventually, Clinton paid Paula Jones $850K and found Monica a cushy job in NYC. Eventually, he’d be impeached and survive politically. Now, he’s been directly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. Will the Clintons ever face justice?

By popular request! Tonight’s “Buzz’s Bedtime Story” tells the unimaginable time when Bill Clinton lost the “nuclear codes” at a time he was focused on Monica Lewinsky. This is a good one! Thread. 1) When I first arrived in the Clinton White House in the spring of 1996, I got busy immersing myself in my new experience, learning my job carrying the “nuclear football,” meeting the staff, and getting to know the Secret Service guys and girls. The first thing I immediately noticed only a few days into my duty was that there was a young female intern who had unusual access to the Oval Office. She was actually assigned to the Old Executive Office building and not the West Wing. But her security access badge matched mine, as the carrier of the nuke football, and I needed access to the president at all times. I asked one of my agent buddies who she was. He said, “Oh, don’t go there. That’s a close friend of the president.” That “close friend” was Monica Lewinsky. Coming from the Air Force, where they definitely frowned on that sort of stuff, my antennae went up. Over the next several months, I saw a lot of Monica. Not as much as Bill did, of course, but a lot. One lazy Saturday afternoon, Clinton asked me to come to the Oval and place a phone call to the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. During the weekends,the military aide would work with the NSC to place calls to other leaders of state. I sat at Betty Curry’s desk in the outer Oval and placed the call. It took a while to hook the call up with the Egyptian military aide. When I finally got Mr. Mubarak on the phone, I walked into the Oval to inform the president. As I did, I walked in on Bill and Monica actually hanging out. I knew what was going on, the staff knew what was going on, and, yes, Hillary knew what was going on. The rest of the world didn’t.  While this affair was ongoing, Paula Jones was simultaneously suing Clinton for sexual harassment years earlier in Little Rock. I attended the Jones deposition with Clinton in D.C. and, for the first time, the lawyers for Jones raised the name Monica Lewinsky in their questioning. I knew the history and my Air Force eyebrows raised. Ultimately, as a result of that deposition, Clinton agreed to a payment of $850K to Jones to make her go away.  For the first time, in addition to Jones, Clinton immediately knew he had another problem with Monica. A few weeks later, the Drudge Report would shock the world with the news about Monica and the national media immediately picked up on it. For the second time in less than a month, Bill had a huge bimbo problem.  Part Two below…