What You Didn't Know About The DC-3


In '51 they tried to ground the noble DC-3,
And so some lawyers brought the case before the CAB,
The Board examined all the facts behind their great oak portal,
And then pronounced these simple words, "The Gooney Bird's immortal."

THEY PATCH HER UP WITH MASKING TAPE,
WITH PAPER CLIPS AND STRINGS,
AND STILL SHE FLIES, SHE NEVER DIES.
METHUSELAH WITH WINGS.

The Army toasts their SkyTrain now in lousy scotch and soda,
The Tommies raise their tankards high to cheer their old Dakota,
Some claim the C-47's best, or the gallant R4D,
Forget that claim, they're all the same, the noble DC-3.

(chorus)

Douglas built the ship to last, but nobody expected,
The crazy heap would fly and fly no matter how they wrecked it.
While nations fall and men retire and jets get obsolete,
The Gooney Bird flies on and on, at 11,000 feet.

(chorus)

No matter what they do to her, The Gooney Bird still flies,
One crippled plane was fitted out with one wing half the size,
She hunched her shoulders, then took off, I know this makes us laugh
One wing askew, and yet she flew ... The DC-2 and a half.

(chorus)

She had her faults, but after all, who's perfect in this sphere?
Her heating system was a gem, and we loved her for her gear.
Of course, her windows leaked a bit when the rain came pouring down,
She'd keep you warm, but in a storm it's possible you'd drown.

(chorus)

Well now she flies the feeder routes and carries mail and freight,
She's just an airborne office or a flying twelve ton crate,

THEY PATCH HER UP WITH MASKING TAPE,
WITH PAPER CLIPS AND STRINGS,
AND STILL SHE FLIES, SHE NEVER DIES.
METHUSELAH WITH WINGS.

Who Invented the Internet?

In today's encore selection - from Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back by Andrew Zolli & Ann Marie Healy. The internet was created by the U.S. military as a way to preserve communications to missile silos in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack:

A visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet.


"From its inception as a U.S. military funded project in the 1960s, the Internet was designed to solve a particular problem above all else: to ensure the continuity of communications in the face of disaster. Military leaders at the time were concerned that a preemp­tive nuclear attack by the Soviets on U.S. telecommunications hubs could disrupt the chain of command -- and that their own counterstrike orders might never make it from their command bunkers to their in­tended recipients in the missile silos of North Dakota. So they asked the Internet's original engineers to design a system that could sense and automatically divert traffic around the inevitable equipment failures that would accompany any such attack.

"The Internet achieves this feat in a simple yet ingenious way: It breaks up every email, web page, and video we transmit into packets of information and forwards them through a labyrinthine network of routers -- specialized network computers that are typically redundantly connected to more than one other node on the network. Each router contains a regularly updated routing table, similar to a local train sched­ule. When a packet of data arrives at a router, this table is consulted and the packet is forwarded in the general direction of its destination. If the best pathway is blocked, congested, or damaged, the routing table is updated accordingly and the packet is diverted along an alternative path­way, where it will meet the next router in its journey, and the process will repeat. A packet containing a typical web search may traverse dozens of Internet routers and links -- and be diverted away from multiple conges­tion points or offline computers -- on the seemingly instantaneous trip between your computer and your favorite website.

"The highly distributed nature of the routing system ensures that if a malicious hacker were to disrupt a single, randomly chosen computer on the Internet, or even physically blow it up, the network itself would be unlikely to be affected. The routing tables of nearby routers would simply be updated and would send network traffic around the damaged machine. In this way, it's designed to be robust in the face of the antici­pated threat of equipment failure.


"However, the modern Internet is extremely vulnerable to a form of attack that was unanticipated when it was first invented: the malicious exploitation of the network's open architecture -- not to route around damage, but to engorge it with extra, useless information. This is what Internet spammers, computer worms and viruses, botnets, and distrib­uted denial of service attacks do: They flood the network with empty packets of information, often from multiple sources at once. These del­uges hijack otherwise beneficial features of the network to congest the system and bring a particular computer, central hub, or even the whole network to a standstill."

Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
 
author: Andrew Zolli & Ann Marie Healy  
title: Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back  
publisher: Free Press  
date: Copyright 2012 by Andrew Zolli

Another month in the Idiocracy

Our Titanic Juneteenth Pride


JUN 24, 2023

For a time in the late 1990s, after the hit movie Titanic was released, I became immersed in the subject. Which was a bit uncharacteristic for me, given its general non-conspiratorial nature. Only later would I learn about the critics of the upcoming Federal Reserve Act perishing, and even theories that the entire thing was faked.

This week, America 2.0 has been inundated with coverage of a handful of men becoming lost while sinking to the bottom of the ocean, in an effort to get a closeup view of the sunken liner. They were all wealthy enough to pay $250,000 each for the ultimate One Percent adventure. I didn’t pay much attention to the story at first, but once they claimed that the leader had made some ridiculous comments about not hiring any “50 year old White guys,” my spidey-sense was triggered. And then I learned that one of their wives was a descendant of a famous Titanic couple. Oh, the irony! But when I saw the craft they were in….

Really, that piece of junk looked a lot like one of those Apollo spacecrafts, which we are told traveled through the Van Allen radiation belt (which is supposedly impenetrable now), and the unimaginable dangers of space, protected by about four inches of aluminum foil lining. Aluminum foil isn’t even that foolproof on leftovers, but as we’ve been told many times, things were different in 1969. It was the Space Age. A president could make a phone call to the moon using a land line. That’s when men were men, and transgenders were not seen or heard. At any rate, if you’ve seen the craft, which is in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, you’ll understand my point.

So this submersible thing really reminded me of those ramshackle Apollo crafts with the aluminum foil lining. And apparently these daring One Percenters didn’t even really test it out first. Well, to be fair, NASA never tested the Lunar Lander on earth, either. So they were just following the strategy of greater men than you or I. I don’t know what a craft that is going to plunge 13,000 feet to the ocean floor is supposed to look like, but I don’t think it ought to look like that. It kind of resembled a Disney ride from Animal Kingdom or something. But then again, I don’t think the Apollo spaceships looked like craft capable to flying to the moon and back should look, either. But what do I know? I’m a community college dropout.

When I started paying attention to this drama, it seemed to me there weren’t really any actual attempts at rescue going on. According to our habitually lying mainstream media, the Navy can only send a submarine down to the depths of 10,000 feet. What? So a craft that looked like it came out of some twelve year old’s back yard, which some wildly rich guys nevertheless paid a fortune for, was trusted to go deeper down in the water than our military submarines? Does that make any sense whatsoever? Shouldn’t a naval submarine be able to go as deep as it wants? Aren’t we the greatest country in the world? Reminded me of how our military did nothing at all while hijacked aircraft headed towards the Pentagon on 9/11. That’s some Military Industrial Complex!

It’s kind of mysterious how they can allegedly send unmanned probes to the outskirts of our solar system, but evidently can’t probe the deepest parts of our earthly oceans. It reminds me of how the Hubble telescope can give us those cool pictures of the Milky Way galaxy and such, but not zoom in on one of the Apollo landing sites on the moon. Or for that matter, give us a nice view of the giant spinning ball we all inhabit. Universal Studios came up with that iconic spinning ball image almost 100 years ago, when our space program was a mere twinkle in Werner von Braun’s then-Nazi eye. And yet they knew what it looked like. Somehow they knew. But they can’t get to a depth of 13,000 feet to perform a rescue. It’s a science thing, you wouldn’t understand.

Our military, like the rest of our monstrously expensive but useless bureaucracy, is really good at telling you what they can’t do. Which is pretty much anything that might make life better for people. Can’t control the border. Can’t cure cancer. Can’t end poverty. Can’t win the “war” on drugs. Can’t plow the roads during blizzards. Can’t keep the power on. Can’t hold the rich and powerful accountable under the law. So, saying they can’t conduct some kind of rescue for people 13,000 feet below the ocean- not 13,000 light years away, or even 13,000 miles, is par for the course for them. Which is why we have to keep giving them trillions to spend on…other things. Something. Like the police, they will never be there when you need them.

The state controlled media makes the excuses for them. They are their publicity agents. I wish I had a publicist like them. I’d sure sell a lot more books. But common people- the Sheeple who vote back in 96 percent of incumbents every election- also make excuses for them. I’ve encountered them on forums and social media. And they’re not getting paid millions like the “journalists” whose job it is to defend these corrupt and incompetent authorities religiously. They do it for free. Angrily speaking up for those who are Experts in Not Getting it Done, as Charles Dickens called them over 150 years ago. Try making excuses like that for not doing your work. You certainly won’t get any online trolls defending you.

Now this dramatic event, which was undoubtedly distracting us from other, more important things, took place very close to Juneteenth, the most preposterous federal holiday in our history. And also during Pride Month, the most preposterous celebratory month the “Woke” folks ever invented. Well, there was a lot to be proud of in just this one event. Proud of the trillions we’ve lavished upon our bloated defense budget, which is so incompetent it couldn’t even launch an effort to rescue Americans stranded on the ocean floor, near the beloved wreckage of the Titanic. Now, we could probably understand if they didn’t have the time to rescue some common riff-raff, but these were billionaires, or at least multi-multi millionaires. Don’t their lives matter?

That just doesn’t make me proud. But exactly who is supposed to be proud during Pride Month? What are we supposed to be proud of? As the late, great Norm MacDonald once said, it’s not an achievement. You haven’t accomplished anything by being gay. Can boring heterosexuals be proud of being heterosexual? How about sadists, or masochists, or exhibitionists? Voyeurs? I don’t know, stare into a window, even from a distance, and if you’re common riff-raff, you might go to jail. Be listed as a sex offender. I would advise any prospective voyeurs to dress in drag and see what happens. My guess is it will no longer be considered a crime.

Do bisexuals get to have “pride?” Like half-Blacks, maybe only half-pride? What about the impotent, who can’t afford Viagra? Can they be “proud” of their erectile dysfunction? Aren’t they very tangible victims, like so many others? How about the nuns and monks who actually honor their vows of chastity? Shouldn’t that be a source of pride? Isn’t celibacy some kind of virtue? Do the dwindling number of parents with very large families get to be proud of their broods during Pride Month? That used to be the case- parents being proud of having lots of children and all. It seems the definition of “pride” has changed quite a bit. Now, a parent can only be proud of their child if they come out of the closet.

During Pride Month, I want to speak up for all the lonely guys, the incels out there. The ones who get castigated as “creeps,” for looking at females, and even going so far as to ask them out on dates. Again, I suggest you dress in drag, and try staring. Or asking out. You will no longer be considered a “creep,” even if you remain an incel. You might even be able to fix that, too, by charging the woman you want to have sex with as a “transphobe.” After all, as a school system close to my area has shown, you can physically rape a girl in a public school restroom, and as long as you were dressed as a woman during the crime, you won’t be prosecuted.

The possibilities for transgenders are endless. The world really is their oyster now. You can be 6’4 and keep all your male equipment, like “Lia” Thomas, and be permitted to change in locker rooms next to pretty biological females before winning swim meets against them. You may well be awarded a “Woman of the Year” thing. And my guess is that, if Lia or some other “trans female” athlete has a “sexual emergency” in one of those locker rooms, like that forgotten migrant did when he raped an eight year old boy at a public pool, they probably wouldn’t be charged with rape. Or anything. I never heard the migrant with the “sexual emergency” was prosecuted.

So there are a lot of Idiocracy-style elements colliding all at once in just this month. Juneteenth? The name denotes stupidity. It’s basically an Ebonics name, for an Ebonics holiday. And if they kept it at the level of St. Patrick’s Day, or Valentine’s Day, I guess that would be alright. But when you make it a federal holiday, it’s in rarified company, representing the things your society considers most important. So how is a holiday most of us can’t even understand, and which has dubious historical significance, given the status of Christmas or Thanksgiving? Forget Easter, that’s about as important to this collapsing culture as National Pizza Day is.

I remember when Stevie Wonder and other Black celebrities began pushing for a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King back in the 1980s. Now I love Martin Luther King, but was he really the greatest American who ever lived? You’d have to believe that, since no other individual historical figure has a federal holiday in his name. George Washington got bumped down to Presidents Day, where he shares the stage with the likes of Millard Fillmore. And those same Blacks weren’t quite as interested in exposing the truth about King’s death. Not interested in anything but getting the “racist” White establishment to cave in to their demands. To pander. What they do best. And it was no contest. Only Jesse Helms really spoke out against it.

So, in terms of honoring our past, America presently has Independence Day, Martin Luther King Day, and now Juneteenth as federal holidays. So two out of three concern the same 12 percent of the population that dominates commercials and the sports world. Our second largest minority group. That ought to tell you something about the cuckization of our society. Matt Gaetz, by the way, was caught in Congress the other day accusing John Durham, and by implication the conservative mainstream, with being the Washington Generals. That’s kind of amazing, given that ‘s become one of my talking points. I haven’t heard anyone else make that comparison. Maybe someone on his staff listens to my show.

Essentially, Juneteenth is George Floyd Day. No one had heard of it before the mostly peaceful protests in the summer of 2020. While pandering to his almost nonexistent Black support, Donald Trump promised to make Juneteenth a federal holiday during his 2020 campaign, and for good measure designated the truly invisible KKK as a terrorist group. But not Black Lives Matter. Congress didn’t pass a law making Juneteenth a federal holiday until June, 2021, when Joe Biden signed it. There is no doubt that Trump would have signed it, too. It’s not like it was legislation to station troops on the border and end government benefits for illegal immigrants.

“Fearless” podcast host Jason Whitlock, who happens to be Black, is the only voice I’ve heard who has exposed Juneteenth for the farce it is. Certainly no White voice is going to do it. Or any Hispanic or Asian voices either, apparently. Whitlock and his mostly Black fellow contributors do a nice job of calling out the “Woke” tyranny, and the celebration of ghetto culture. Whitlock and his frequent guest, former NBA first round pick Royce White, come very close to what I envisioned with my character Phosphate Jefferson, in my novel The Unreals. Phosphate represented my ideal Black figure, and the kind of Black person I would be. Like me, he pontificated and ranted a lot. So do Whitlock and White. Much of what they say could have come from my book.

Whitlock has the courage to tie everything he says to a Biblical world view. As he has pointed out, we are supposed to be reminded that pride goeth before the fall. Pride used to be considered a character flaw, if not a sin. But once they started propping up certain groups- recall Aretha Franklin’s iconic hit Respect Yourself, and inserted scenes in every Hollywood production of skinny females coldcocking large White males, that saying went down the memory hole, right alongside “There but for the grace of God go I.” Isn’t “White Supremacy” derived from pride? Why then, isn’t that being celebrated? The outfits of the Klan would coordinate nicely next to the garish and colorful costumes of the transgender brigade. Who are all, of course, very proud.

If they had wanted to make a federal holiday to honor lifelong street criminal George Floyd, how many Republicucks would have opposed it? Maybe they’ll throw Whitey a crumb and devote a federal holiday to Dylan Mulvaney. Or Lia Thomas. They could call it Mulvaney/Thomas Day, kind of like the antiquated White Supremacist Lee/ Jackson Day. To make conservatives happy, why not Caitlin Jenner? “She” was once the world’s greatest athlete, you know. But no dead, White “racist” males, like Thomas Jefferson. Remember, Harriet Tubman is the greatest woman in American history, according to our soon to be digitalized fiat currency. Our second largest minority group is truly a special lot. Who else can play cornerback or running back in the NFL?

So perhaps the fallen billionaires of the unimposing Titan didn’t die in vain. Maybe they got to see the actual Titanic before they blew up. The military is now informing us that they pretty much knew this laughable craft had exploded five days earlier. So they let the sheeple breathlessly follow the inane “journalists” covering the story, sitting tensely on the edge of their seats, when they already knew they were dead? Again, does that make any sense? All that’s left is for MSNBC or The New York Times to claim that their dying words were, “Long live Pride Month and Juneteenth!” If only there had been a Black on board, maybe they too could get a federal holiday.

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