An Anniversary of an Incident – 1992
October 3rd, 2007 by xformed
I missed it by a day. Oct 2nd, 1992 is a date with memories for myself and those in the Med that night….
Category: History, Military, Military History, Navy | 3 Comments »
October 3rd, 2007 by xformed
I missed it by a day. Oct 2nd, 1992 is a date with memories for myself and those in the Med that night….
Category: History, Military, Military History, Navy | 3 Comments »
October 3rd, 2007 by xformed
Last week I got a trackback…so the trend is in the positive region of the chart!
Anyhow, this is effectively Part III of warfare and war games at the Naval War College. Short one today, as I am prepping highly classified plans for the next big event. A few will get “briefed in” later this week with new, sink the Army technology that is now in my hands…
The story actually begins in 1985, at Christmas time to be more precise. I was in Singapore, and, took advantage of the wonderful pricing on a variety of cassettes. The music, in the days before iTunes and CDs took up more volume per song, as did the playing devices, so the collection for listening wasn’t too large or varied. I picked up three tapes to add to the Staff collection, one of which was the soundtrack to “Beverly Hills Cop.” One of the songs was used as a “morale booster” over the battle group circuits in the mockups, in that red brick building SSW of the main War College one.
When we were engaged with the mass raids of TU-95D Bears and TU-160 Backfires, who had been marshalling over Indian territory, where our ROE disallowed our presence, with threat of direct military action by Indian forces if we penetrated their airspace, it turned out my “AW” (Group Anti-Air Warfare Commander) had been quite effective, once the Soviets headed to sea and went “feet wet.”
I was I a good mood, as was the rest of the friendly forces and staffs, having had the foresight to plan and now execute a solid battle plan. I figured, now that the war was in full auto for the moment and our F-14s were splashing bandits like shooting fish in a barrel, I’d play some music: “The Heat is On” followed by “The Neutron Dance.”
Back in the day, when we could neither confirm nor deny some bits of information, struck with some sort of military amnesia, this had some not so subtle undertones.
For some reason, the game controllers got a mite upset with our frivolity and asked us to secure the music. I exercised my command position to tell them “no.”
Next week: The attire for staff during conflict….
Category: Open Trackbacks | Comments Off on Ropeyarn Sunday "Sea Stories" and Open Trackbacks
October 3rd, 2007 by xformed
I computed an azimuth value from the Flight 93 crater site to Mecca of roughly 55.20°.
“Azimuth” is the technical term for “direction,” measured in degrees clockwise from north. Now Griffith is denying that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca, and the Tribune Review refuses to tell its readers that Griffith is contradicting the report that he wrote for them.
The Post Gazette is even more outrageous. Rawls was told by Post Gazette reporter Paula Ward that she and her editors saw all the blog posts on the Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace back in September 2005 and decided not to publish this explosive information. (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, p. 108.) At the same time, the Post Gazette was running editorials that called critics of the crescent paranoid bigots:
But like those who look at innocent kids trick-or-treating at Halloween and see only the devil’s work, a few small and suspicious minds couldn’t look past the crescent to see a remarkably sensitive design.
When Tom Burnet Sr. asked the American people last month to please take his and Mr. Rawls’ warnings about the crescent design seriously, the Post Gazette responded with an editorial titled:
“Efforts to sully Flight 93 memorial deserve scorn.”
What is the significance of a crescent that a person faces into to face Mecca? Such a structure is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. That is why the surrounding trees added in the Bowl of Embrace redesign do nothing to alter the Islamic significance of the design. You can plant as many trees around a mosque as you want and it will still be a mosque.
One local paper actually did fact-check the orientation of the giant crescent and validated the Mecca orientation claim in print, but the larger papers are all refusing to pass this fact checking on, or to do their own, even though it is simple one-two operation. All that Tribune Democrat reporter Kirk Swauger had to do was use the Mecca direction calculator at Islam.com to print out a graphic of the direction to Mecca from Somerset PA, then place this print out over the Crescent of Embrace site-plan PDF on his computer screen:
The green circle, marked with the qibla direction (the direction to Mecca), is from Islam.com. Graphic shows that a person standing at the midpoint between the most obtruding tips of the crescent structure and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow), will be facing almost exactly at Mecca. (Hat tip Sarah Wells.)
As Swauger put it in his news
article:
[Rawls’] claims seem to be backed up by coordinates for the direction of qibla from Somerset that can be found on Islam.com. When superimposed over the crescent in the memorial design, the midpoint points over the Arctic Circle, through Europe toward Mecca.
Having suppressed this information for two years, Pittsburgh’s major newspapers are desperate to keep it suppressed now, or they will be ruined. Thus they find themselves camped out on the very spot that the blogosphere ranged with its artillery two years ago. They know full well that the Mecca-orientation of the crescent has been verified numerous times and are counting on their
control of public information to keep this knowledge from getting out to the general public.
The challenge to bloggers could not be more overt. Can the blogosphere retrieve its earlier fact checking from the memory hole and bust these news frauds? Easy and permanent access to existing fact checking is the blogosphere’s natural advantage, but we still have to take advantage of it.
This information was also mentioned at Newsbusters here on September 27, 2007.
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If you want to join us outraged protesting bloggers
Please contact caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com with your website url. She will, in turn, add you to the email list, send you the
blogroll code (if you want to put it in your sidebar), and will send you the prewritten text to post. You should receive the email from Cao a day or two prior to the Wednesday it should be posted, and tracked back to Cao’s blog and Error Theory, if your blog has that capability. This will help us track who in the blogroll is posting the blogburst.
Let’s roll.
Stop the Memorial Blogburst
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Riddle me this:
What was Paul Murdoch, the design’s architect, thinking? What was his ulterior motive? When controversy over the original name “Crescent of Embrace” and the bald Islamic symbol planted on the crash site brought a public outcry, the entire memorial was hastily re-titled “40 Memorial Groves.”
As Alec is apt to do, he’s having some fun with this: So why only 38 Memorial Groves?
His answer should appear today at Error Theory, go check it out!
Trackedback @: Cao’s Blog and Error Theory
Category: 2996 Tribute, Blogging, Geo-Political, Leadership, Political, Public Service | Comments Off on Stop the Murdoch (Flt 93 Cresent) Memorial Blogburst