Crap Throwing Monkey

Impressive company, at least. The one thing that jumps out from that site is how many ports they manage that generate traffic incoming to the US. If they're a threat to national security, it's not going to be because they manage US ports. Or is that too complicated for the knee-jerk reactionary fear-mongering crowd?

Realistically (and seriously), though...is the location of the maintenance company's global HQ going to make that much of a difference in the security of a dam?

Doubt it. Bits of fried elbow pasta were found at the scene...

But he was the Chosen One!

I don't want to meet the woman that can kick a 700-lb bear's ass. Mostly because she'll call me a jerk and dump a beer on my head...

Friggin' Mayans and their defective calendar. It's always the friggin' Mayans... Oooooh, that's so close to almost being a fluffy description of particle physics for idiots. Almost. "Close" didn't count when he was swinging a bat, either. Too bad he's an ex-Philly. Phillies fans are too cynical and not nearly delusional enough to buy this load of tripe. If he were an ex-Met, on the other hand...

Somehow, I doubt a guy that can't even figure out how to turn off the !@#$ing caps-lock qualifies as "level-headed". Just a gut feeling I have...

I live by the rule that any concept that can't be summarized and expressed in 25 words or less is not fully understood. Doesn't mean you always SHOULD use 25 words or less (though it would be fine advice for some around here). Just means you should be able to.

Ed, as a wedding gift, I'm going to splurge and get you a subscription to Defense News. If you had to read about Pentagon acquisitions on a weekly basis from a truly unbiased source, you'd come to realize how utterly !@#$ed up DoD is, and how much they don't need a larger budget. You might also come to realize how utterly and systemically (i.e. non-partisan) !@#$ed up Congress is as well.

Austria was awash in nut-jobs at the time, however. Knowing he's a nut-job, and distinguishing him from the hundred-thousand anti-semitic Viennese nut-jobs as the man who would disrupt all of Europe and kill millions are two different things.

I get the same feeling. I can't find anything objectively wrong with it (I haven't yet heard any real argument against it that doesn't boil down to "Sand !@#$s? NIMBY.") But at the same time...it's sitting with me like last week's leftover anchovy pizza. What I'd really like to know is: who are the majority stakeholders in both these companies? It wouldn't be terribly surprising if the British company were majority Saudi-owned, selling a contract to a UAE company that's majority Japanese-owned, or some such. Particularly as, while I can see HQ'ing a company in the UAE for tax/economic reasons (in principle - I don't know if there ARE any, but it's possible), the Emirates don't exactly have an extensive maritime history that leads one to believe they could manage six major ports. Does anyone know that this company is owned by the UAE?

...used three paragraphs to express precisely nothing?

I can't stand Maher (he used to be funny, now he's just a pompus ass). But that's brilliant...I'll have to see if I can catch that.

That in itself is pretty amazing. Most people probably couldn't even get their cars started two hours after the storm...the NG and CG are already up in helos.

How is that schizophrenic? "I'm against abortion...but I'm also against forcing my moral philosophy on another human being." Sounds pretty good to me. (Note: any agreement between my post and Mickey's is purely conicidental.)

Wow. IMPRESSIVE non-sequiter.

Wow. Gutsy call. That gives her a lot of time to come to her senses...

Depends on where you place it. Driving one of those bloated things into the carrier berths at Norfolk looks bloody damned easy on a map and satellite photos... (Yes, I know it wouldn't be nearly as easy as it looks on a map or satellite photos...but it's still real to me, dammit!)

Warheads are cheap. Radar guidance packages hardened against EM and solid rocket propellant are expensive. For the price of a single Hawk - new, I'll admit - and it's 60kg warhead, you could purchase roughly a thousand 500-lb bombs. So trade them to the Chinese for 500-lb bombs. Still a better use than trying to destroy anything with a 60kg fragmentation warhead.

I was not aware you made a distinction...

I've got four - four - working on the case involving my car right now (it was parked, drunk ran into it and totalled it, said drunk is going to have his balls ripped off if I have anything to say about it). Four. Pro-bono. I've got more lawyers than mechanics working on this. When you can find four lawyers willing to work for free on a simple non-injury hit-and-run...then yeah, this country has too many lawyers.

Fixed that typo for you...

Why the hell would anyone turn a surface-to-air missile like the Hawk into an air-to-surface missile? You going to take out Chinese anti-satellite Antarctic lasers with it? My understanding is they got the damned things to launch from the F-14s in an air-to-air capacity...which, if they did, is a pretty impressive piece of engineering, given that they'd probably have to reengineer the Tomcat's radar as well as the Hawk's seeker and control mechanisms. But like I said...I have a hard time believing it. Even if Iran has a surprisingly competent aircraft industry.

About as threatening as the Chinese antisattelite laser at the South Pole. They'd do better loading a nuke into a Cessna. A 757 makes a better strategic asset than a SU-25. Hell, a Tu22M3 makes a better strategic asset than any of them - faster, longer range, can actually deliver nuclear weapons - and the Iranians have a handful of those. But let's all whine and B word and panic and cry and moan about a plane none of you ever heard of until this thread, that the Iranians ALREADY had about fifty copies of before they bought these three, that can't even reach most regional strategic targets, and that none of you know anything about anyway. As I said, a 757 makes a better strategic asset than a SU-25.

More like fifty.