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Burns And The Vietnam War

Were you there? I was. Since I doubt if anyone will ever interview me for a special documentary -- since I wasn't an officer or a grunt. I'm going to add my story here. 1968 was the year I graduated from Moorestown Senior High School in Moorestown, NJ. We were already burying our alumni dead from the conflict at that point. Way I saw it, I could either try to go to college or enlist. You really didn't have much of a choice in the matter. Especially when your parents thought the oldest of the family should go to college -- a female and the males would get $500 and told there's the door, don't let it hit you in the ass when leave.  So, I went to RCA Institute Of Electronics in Cherry Hill, NJ until my money ran out and was in the Army by 1 May 1969. I signed up for 3 years to get the GI Bill and work on fix, which sounds good on paper but never delivers. Exited basic as an E-2 and awarded Sharpshooter with the M-16 and Expert with the M-14.

Pilot Crashes perfectly good airplane: What's wrong with this picture?

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A month or so back, a pilot of a 1.2 million dollar airplane killed himself and his girlfriend in a perfectly good airplane on a perfectly great day with the mechanical features of the airplane in perfect working condition. So, why did Alan Ram and Krista Buchanan die with prejudice? All his electrical equipment stopped working. Ram's last words tell the story: "I'm still having an electrical issue. I had one on Friday and ... I'm about to go dead". In-other-words, he had no instruments. I can only speculate on whether or not the engine -- a 350hp turbine -- was still capable of running without direct electrical power. But logic tells me, being just a half mile away from the airfield where he crashed that he probably didn't. Let's take a look at the way "old school" conventional aircraft controls look. Since the pilot in Command flies in the left seat, the flight instruments are on his side. From top to bottom, the first is an

Is a 9.2 EarthQuake Cascadia really on is on its way?

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There is a common belief  that Juan de Fuca Plate will force itself hard enough against the North Atlantic Plate to cause a 9.2 earthquake. So, last week,  when my daughter messaged the family with a link to a Fox News, I started laughing so hard, my wife thought there was something wrong. According Shepard Smith of Fox News , a "stunning" article run in the New Yorker said that a 9.2 mega quake was "on its way" and would be spurred on when the Juan de Fuca Plate supposedly causes the North American Plate to rupture -- all along a 700 mile length of the Cascadia subduction zone to finally give in and let the Juan De Fuca Plate to slide underneath it. Well, it isn't going to happen. Why? Because it happened in Japan in 2013 on the Pacific Plate which goes from the Juan De Fuca Plate to the Eurasian Plate is expanded along with the Juan De Fuca Plate by magma. History of the 9.0+ quake can be found here. Only problem is, the Pacific Plate slides