C17 Decoy In Afghanistan? Not.

So let’s say the 02-1109 C-17 decoy weighed 100,000 lbs, never mind the expense of building a pointless decoy that weighed this much. The wing loading would be 100,000 lb /3800sq ft = 26.3 lbs/sq ft. But that’s not including the horizontal stabilizer which technically adds to the wing loading of a decoy. So let’s recalculate that…100,000 lbs / (3800 + 845)sq ft = 21.5 lbs/ft!! This doesn’t even factor in what it would take to move around a lumbering 100,000, let alone 50,000 pound decoy. It’s my contention at even at 100k pounds, the decoy would have to be tied down at any wind higher than 25 or 30 miles an hour to prevent it from “taking off” or at least moving out of place. The point of a decoy is to fool observers from a distance, not up close. And this video is not proof of a decoy

Sorry to bust the phantasmagoric illusion.

US Civil Flag?

Do you recognize this flag?
In our history, we have 3 flags; First, there is the 4 US Code Ch. 1: FLAG. Then there is the Law of Admiralty Flag which is bordered in gold fringe. The third Flag is the US Civil Flag, little is know about it, but here’s what I do know.  This flag was first described in 1850 by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in which he introduces the “The Custom House”:

The Timid Politician

Let’s talk about the “Timid Politicians” that infest the halls of Legislature across America and in particular Iowa. Remember, complacency doesn’t lead to change, you have to be upset enough to demand change.

Although the Constitution provides no assurance that any branch of government will make policy choices you like, the Constitution offers legitimacy to those choices and legitimate pathways to override any of those choices.  The people who make those choices would have to stand for election, they would have to work with others who stand for election, and crucially, they would have to play by rules that we all agree to beforehand rather than making them up as they go along.  Of course, the Constitution already does all of this. And thus it bears emphasis at the outset that the Constitution itself is not broken.  What is broken is our Nation’s willingness to obey the Constitution and to hold our leaders accountable to it.  All three branches of the federal government have wandered far from the roles that the Constitution sets out for them.  For various reasons, “We the People” have allowed all three branches of government to get away with it.  And with each power grab, the next somehow seems less objectionable.  When measured by how far we have strayed from the Constitution we originally agreed to, the government’s flagrant and repeated violations of the Rule Of Law amount to a wholesale abdication of the Constitution’s design.