HofT wrote:Thanks for the confirm, Ican. Was the 45,000 ft ceiling at the time the plane was known as 25BGF?
No! Guess again what it's tail number was.
HofT wrote:Separately, aren't you a fan of Boyd?
Who's "Boyd"?
25BGF is how the Lear 25 was originally known - it's not a tail number. Boyd, if you don't know who he was, is a separate subject as I said.
Thank you for the info!
P.S. was just responding to this post, which you've since edited:
_______________________________________________________
Yes, I am a pilot!
I flew a Lear 25 in our charter business. Currently, I provide pilot services and flight instruction in other people's airplanes, some of which are stored in my hangar.
_________________
I bet certainty is impossible and probability suffices to govern belief and action. One sees things from a different perspective at an altitude of 45,000 feet.
Last edited by ican711nm on 2004-11-02, 21:51; edited 1 time in total____________________________________________________
sorry didn't make it clear, post is on previous page.
Foxfyre wrote:And yes I've seen the frontline special and declared the slant they put on it to be mostly bunk.
Slant? You mean like bringing back to the light the fact that General Thomas White, Secretary of the Army, and General Eric Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff, both insisted that 300,000 or more troops would be needed for the occupation to secure the peace? You mean the slant that Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz wanted to go in with only 50,000?
The full transcript will be available in a few days. Meanwhile here is some more slant that seems entirely reasonable to me.
Interview: General Thomas White; Secretary of the Army from 2001 until April 2003, when he was fired by Donald Rumsfeld.
Quote:Is the Army broken?
Yeah, I think so. We're on the brink. We are in a situation where we are grossly overdeployed, and it is unlike any other period in the 229-year history of the Army. We have never conducted a sustained combat operation with a volunteer force, with a force that we have to compete in the job market to hire every year. Every other force that we've ever done this with, going back to the Vietnam period to something comparable, has been a draftee conscript force.
So what we are all worried about is that the manpower situation will come unglued. ... The Army is people; it's not weapons or platforms. Somebody once said, "A soldier's not in the Army; they are the Army." And the quality of the soldiers [has] been the enormous advantage we've had since the volunteer force was put in place, and the quality of the noncommissioned officers corps.
Well, that is a married Army, among other things. You may recruit soldiers, but you retain families. And I think we're all concerned that we are teetering on the brink here and that if we can't get to a lower operational tempo, or at least have some point in the future that we can set our sails against where it might occur, that the Army on the manpower side's going to come unglued.
HofT,
I didn't know this either: "25BGF is how the Lear 25 was originally known."
My specific model was a 1997, 25D.
ican711nm wrote:Foxfyre wrote: ... he did gave aid and comfort to the enemy. It is that, more than anything else, for which most of his fellow servicemen hold him in contempt.
As usual your comments are right on the mark.
From Revel's link [my emhasis added]:
Quote:Contrary to what those critics, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, have implied, Kerry was speaking on behalf of many soldiers when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, and said this:
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
Kerry alleged he was speaking on behalf of "many soldiers". That
many has not been shown to be even one-hundredth of one percent. The bold face statement converts this Kerry statement from an accusation against particular soldiers to a
general accusation against all the troops in Vietnam. It implies the inclusion of those in his Swift Boat brigade plus his superior officers to the highest levels. Even if I were to assume it true that the specific atrocities about which Kerry spoke were true, lacking any evidence to the contrary, Kerry's bold face statement is a bold face falsification of the general behavior of our troops. In that regard, it constitutes a terrible slander.
Like I told whoever it was earlier this afternoon. Kerry was under oath, if he spoke any lies he would have been charged with perjury. There never was any charges made to john kerry regarding his testimony. So you have no proof that he lied; so there is no slander. So your statement about John Kerry slandering vietnam vets is unsubstantiated.
I am finished with this, take it or leave it I really don't care to keep posting this back and fourth anymore since it looks like Kerry is not going to be President anyway.
(About the site; all the information came from archives.)
Foxfyre wrote:It strikes me in the litany of sins posted by Revel, that these were apparently known already to the military by the time John Kerry testified about them, and those committing the sins were prosecuted to the fullest extent of military law. This in itself would confirm 1) that these were not common occurrences and were in fact rare anomalies among our servicemen and 2) they were in no way condoned or tolerated by the military.
I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of U.S. service personnel served in Vietnam - I know 55,000 plus died. John Kerry's testimony suggested the atrocities were common and he did not say he had not committed these or that the men he served with served honorably and bravely.
Moreover the way in which he did gave aid and comfort to the enemy. It is that, more than anything else, for which most of his fellow servicemen hold him in contempt.
There are other incidents of occurrences according to the site I linked. Apparently the guy who put the site up, researched the archives on this information and I guess anyone can do the same.
In any event, since there were incidents as is documented, that shows that Kerry did not lie and that was my whole point all along.
DONE;; whew!
Folks, hope it's OK to post this here - I LOVE Learjets. That one is the 25D mentioned by Ican.
HofT, I love LearJets, too. Good photo. Thanks.
revel, you are right that the election will turn out as predicted by those who know. I read this in the Economist today. I love the headline. They were as reluctant with their conclusions as I was, but they were no less informed and decisive.
America's next president
The incompetent or the incoherent?
Oct 28th 2004
From The Economist print edition
With a heavy heart, we think American readers should vote for John Kerry on November 2nd
YOU might have thought that, three years after a devastating terrorist attack on American soil, a period which has featured two wars, radical political and economic legislation, and an adjustment to one of the biggest stockmarket crashes in history, the campaign for the presidency would be an especially elevated and notable affair. If so, you would be wrong. This year's battle has been between two deeply flawed men: George Bush, who has been a radical, transforming president but who has never seemed truly up to the job, let alone his own ambitions for it; and John Kerry, who often seems to have made up his mind conclusively about something only once, and that was 30 years ago. But on November 2nd, Americans must make their choice, as must The Economist. It is far from an easy call, especially against the backdrop of a turbulent, dangerous world. But, on balance, our instinct is towards change rather than continuity: Mr Kerry, not Mr Bush.
Whenever we express a view of that sort, some readers are bound to protest that we, as a publication based in London, should not be poking our noses in other people's politics. Translated, this invariably means that protesters disagree with our choice. It may also, however, reflect a lack of awareness about our readership. The Economist's weekly sales in the United States are about 450,000 copies, which is three times our British sale and roughly 45% of our worldwide total. All those American readers will now be pondering how to vote, or indeed whether to. Thus, as at every presidential election since 1980, we hope it may be useful for us to say how we would think about our vote?-if we had one.
The case against George Bush
That decision cannot be separated from the terrible memory of September 11th, nor can it fail to begin as an evaluation of the way in which Mr Bush and his administration responded to that day. For Mr Bush's record during the past three years has been both inspiring and disturbing.
Mr Bush was inspiring in the way he reacted to the new world in which he, and America, found itself. He grasped the magnitude of the challenge well. His military response in Afghanistan was not the sort of poorly directed lashing out that Bill Clinton had used in 1998 after al-Qaeda destroyed two American embassies in east Africa: it was a resolute, measured effort, which was reassuringly sober about the likely length of the campaign against Osama bin Laden and the elusiveness of anything worth the name of victory. Mistakes were made, notably when at Tora Bora Mr bin Laden and other leaders probably escaped, and when following the war both America and its allies devoted insufficient military and financial resources to helping Afghanistan rebuild itself. But overall, the mission has achieved a lot: the Taliban were removed, al-Qaeda lost its training camps and its base, and Afghanistan has just held elections that bring cautious hope for the central government's future ability to bring stability and prosperity.
The biggest mistake, though, was one that will haunt America for years to come. It lay in dealing with prisoners-of-war by sending hundreds of them to the American base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, putting them in a legal limbo, outside the Geneva conventions and outside America's own legal system. That act reflected a genuinely difficult problem: that of having captured people of unknown status but many of whom probably did want to kill Americans, at a time when to set them free would have been politically controversial, to say the least. That difficulty cannot neutralise the damage caused by this decision, however. Today, Guantánamo Bay offers constant evidence of America's hypocrisy, evidence that is disturbing for those who sympathise with it, cause-affirming for those who hate it. This administration, which claims to be fighting for justice, the rule of law and liberty, is incarcerating hundreds of people, whether innocent or guilty, without trial or access to legal representation. The White House's proposed remedy, namely military tribunals, merely compounds the problem.
When Mr Bush decided to frame his foreign policy in the sort of language and objectives previously associated with Woodrow Wilson, John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, he was bound to be greeted with cynicism. Yet he was right to do so. To paraphrase a formula invented by his ally, Tony Blair, Mr Bush was promising to be "tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism", and the latter he attributed to the lack of democracy, human rights and opportunity in much of the world, especially the Arab countries. To call for an effort to change that lamentable state of affairs was inspiring and surely correct. The credibility of the call was enhanced by this month's Afghan election, and may in future be enhanced by successful and free elections in Iraq. But that remains ahead, and meanwhile Mr Bush's credibility has been considerably undermined not just by Guantánamo but also by two big things: by the sheer incompetence and hubristic thinking evident in the way in which his team set about the rebuilding of Iraq, once Saddam Hussein's regime had been toppled; and by the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which strengthened the suspicion that the mistreatment or even torture of prisoners was being condoned.
Invading Iraq was not a mistake. Although the intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction has been shown to have been flimsy and, with hindsight, wrong, Saddam's record of deception in the 12 years since the first Gulf war meant that it was right not to give him the benefit of the doubt. The containment scheme deployed around him was unsustainable and politically damaging: military bases in holy Saudi Arabia, sanctions that impoverished and even killed Iraqis and would have collapsed. But changing the regime so incompetently was a huge mistake. By having far too few soldiers to provide security and by failing to pay Saddam's remnant army, a task that was always going to be long and hard has been made much, much harder. Such incompetence is no mere detail: thousands of Iraqis have died as a result and hundreds of American soldiers. The eventual success of the mission, while still possible, has been put in unnecessary jeopardy. So has America's reputation in the Islamic world, both for effectiveness and for moral probity.
If Mr Bush had meanwhile been making progress elsewhere in the Middle East, such mistakes might have been neutralised. But he hasn't. Israel and Palestine remain in their bitter conflict, with America readily accusable of bias. In Iran the conservatives have become stronger and the country has moved closer to making nuclear weapons. Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia have not turned hostile, but neither have they been terribly supportive nor reform-minded. Libya's renunciation of WMD is the sole clear piece of progress.
This only makes the longer-term project more important, not less. To succeed, however, America needs a president capable of admitting to mistakes and of learning from them. Mr Bush has steadfastly refused to admit to anything: even after Abu Ghraib, when he had a perfect opportunity to dismiss Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and declare a new start, he chose not to. Instead, he treated the abuses as if they were a low-level, disciplinary issue. Can he learn from mistakes? The current approach in Iraq, of training Iraqi security forces and preparing for elections to establish an Iraqi government with popular support, certainly represents an improvement, although America still has too few troops. And no one knows, for example, whether Mr Rumsfeld will stay in his job, or go. In the end, one can do no more than guess about whether in a second term Mr Bush would prove more competent.
Making sense of John Kerry
That does at least place him on equal terms with his rival, Mr Kerry. With any challenger, voters have to make a leap of faith about what the new man might be like in office. What he says during the campaign is a poor guide: Mr Bush said in 2000 that America should be "a humble nation, but strong" and should eschew nation-building; Mr Clinton claimed in 1992 to want to confront "the butchers of Beijing" and to reflate the economy through public spending.
Like those two previous challengers, Mr Kerry has shaped many of his positions to contrast himself with the incumbent. That is par for the course. What is more disconcerting, however, is the way those positions have oscillated, even as the facts behind them have stayed the same. In the American system, given Congress's substantial role, presidents should primarily be chosen for their character, their qualities of leadership, for how they might be expected to deal with the crises that may confront them, abroad or at home. Oscillation, even during an election campaign, is a worrying sign.
If the test is a domestic one, especially an economic crisis, Mr Kerry looks acceptable, however. His record and instincts are as a fiscal conservative, suggesting that he would rightly see future federal budget deficits as a threat. His circle of advisers includes the admirable Robert Rubin, formerly Mr Clinton's treasury secretary. His only big spending plan, on health care, would probably be killed by a Republican Congress. On trade, his position is more debatable: while an avowed free trader with a voting record in the Senate to confirm it, he has flirted with attacks on outsourcing this year and chosen a rank protectionist as his running-mate. He has not yet shown Mr Clinton's talent for advocacy on this issue, or any willingness to confront his rather protectionist party. Still, on social policy, Mr Kerry has a clear advantage: unlike Mr Bush he is not in hock to the Christian right. That will make him a more tolerant, less divisive figure on issues such as abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research.
The biggest questions, though, must be about foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. That is where his oscillations are most unsettling. A war that he voted to authorise, and earlier this year claimed to support, he now describes as "a mistake". On some occasions he claims to have been profoundly changed by September 11th and to be determined to seek out and destroy terrorists wherever they are hiding, and on others he has seemed to hark back to the old Clintonian view of terrorism as chiefly a question of law and order. He has failed to offer any set of overall objectives for American foreign policy, though perhaps he could hardly oppose Mr Bush's targets of democracy, human rights and liberty. But instead he has merely offered a different process: deeper thought, more consultation with allies.
So what is Mr Kerry's character? His voting record implies he is a vacillator, but that may be unfair, given the technical nature of many Senate votes. His oscillations this year imply that he is more of a ruthless opportunist. His military record suggests he can certainly be decisive when he has to be and his post-Vietnam campaign showed determination. His reputation for political comebacks and as a strong finisher in elections also indicates a degree of willpower that his flip-flopping otherwise belies.
The task ahead, and the man to fit it
In the end, the choice relies on a judgment about who will be better suited to meet the challenges America is likely to face during the next four years. Those challenges must include the probability of another big terrorist attack, in America or western Europe. They must include the need for a period of discipline in economic policy and for compromise on social policy, lest the nation become weak or divided in the face of danger. Above all, though, they include the need to make a success of the rebuilding of Iraq, as the key part of a broader effort to stabilise, modernise and, yes, democratise the Middle East.
Many readers, feeling that Mr Bush has the right vision in foreign policy even if he has made many mistakes, will conclude that the safest option is to leave him in office to finish the job he has started. If Mr Bush is re-elected, and uses a new team and a new approach to achieve that goal, and shakes off his fealty to an extreme minority, the religious right, then The Economist will wish him well. But our confidence in him has been shattered. We agree that his broad vision is the right one but we doubt whether Mr Bush is able to change or has sufficient credibility to succeed, especially in the Islamic world. Iraq's fledgling democracy, if it gets the chance to be born at all, will need support from its neighbours?-or at least non-interference?-if it is to survive. So will other efforts in the Middle East, particularly concerning Israel and Iran.
John Kerry says the war was a mistake, which is unfortunate if he is to be commander-in-chief of the soldiers charged with fighting it. But his plan for the next phase in Iraq is identical to Mr Bush's, which speaks well of his judgment. He has been forthright about the need to win in Iraq, rather than simply to get out, and will stand a chance of making a fresh start in the Israel-Palestine conflict and (though with even greater difficulty) with Iran. After three necessarily tumultuous and transformative years, this is a time for consolidation, for discipline and for repairing America's moral and practical authority. Furthermore, as Mr Bush has often said, there is a need in life for accountability. He has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him, given a viable alternative. John Kerry, for all the doubts about him, would be in a better position to carry on with America's great tasks.
Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Kara! <smooch> Nice to see you again. Here's a pic just for you, a singing wolf
with the soundtrack to be found at his site:
http://www.yellowstone-natl-park.com/wolf.htm
Revel did provide ample info in response to questions, so I guess we'll never find out if our troops really shot dogs in Vietnam. Terrible things always happen in wars, I just hope that particular accusation isn't true.
Interesting site, H. Thanks.
Of course they shot dogs, they would shoot anything, that's not so strange or difficult to believe is it.
Hell, they dropped Agent Orange on the forest. That would kill countless billions of creatures. Dogs? We're concerned about shooting dogs, in this context? Why?
McTag - if you cannot see the difference between soldiers shooting somebody who represents a danger to them, and somebody like a dog, who doesn't, then I have nothing further to say to you on the subject.
McTag wrote:Of course they shot dogs, they would shoot anything, that's not so strange or difficult to believe is it.
Hell, they dropped Agent Orange on the forest. That would kill countless billions of creatures. Dogs? We're concerned about shooting dogs, in this context? Why?
I know what you mean, McTag, the charge of raping 13 year old girls was passed by with no comment, but hey, if you shoot a dog that is really bad.
Personally I give up on this generation of people in my country. It is like they have collectively lost all common sense. Maybe after four years of President Bush a new generation will start to be heard from the populace.
Now I am just wondering on what cause I am going to spend all the energy that I spent on this cause. I have been trying to fight the bushies since 2000. This time the people spoke and it is different than 2000.
Hell they shot four year old kids ... it was that or take the grenades their parents gave them with the instructions to 'give to GI'.
What would you do?
Just in: Hungary announces withdrawal of troops from Iraq by March 2005.
Quote:Now I am just wondering on what cause I am going to spend all the energy that I spent on this cause.
Good question, revel. I, too, am feeling disheartened. But, as Vaclav Havel said:
"Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."
He said it in a different way: "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but he certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
HofT wrote:
Folks, hope it's OK to post this here - I LOVE Learjets. That one is the 25D mentioned by Ican.
I LOVE LEARJETS, too! In particular I loved mine (i.e., the bank's
)and still miss it: N711NM.
Kara wrote:Quote:Now I am just wondering on what cause I am going to spend all the energy that I spent on this cause.
Good question, revel. I, too, am feeling disheartened. But, as Vaclav Havel said:
"Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."
He said it in a different way: "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but he certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
Hi Kara.
I don't know if I have it in me to work for something I know don't have a shot of succeeding. I feel that President Bush and his policies fit that discription of something that don't have a chance of stoping.
Right now enough Americans believe in President Bush and all he stands for and because of that we have lost more than we had even in the house and senate.
I tremble to think who is going to replace some of these judges and what kind of laws or policies are going to come about if the last four years are anything to go by. The only hope I have right now is that they don't do much of anything new.
I imagine that I will come about and a lot of other disheartened folks out there today will too. I just don't want anything to do with politics for a good long while other than to moan about it because I am bone weary of fighting it and the people who believe in President Bush. Meanwhile I will keep your quote in mind, it is a good one.
(I keep saying President Bush to make myself accept him as my president. It hasn't gotten any easier yet. )
enough about this I guess.
