Quotulatiousness

June 8, 2011

New tactic on delinquent student loans: SWAT teams

Filed under: Education, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Thinking about getting behind on paying back your student loan? Think again:

Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

“I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers,” Wright said.

Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as a S.W.A.T team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.

After the public humiliation, he was then handcuffed and chucked into the back of a police car for 6 hours, along with his three young children. He’ll think twice before getting behind on his student loans, right?

Perhaps not: they weren’t even his loans: the SWAT team was looking for his estranged wife.

Ontario’s (pathetic) choices in the next election

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

Read ’em and weep:

Dalton’s McGuinty’s record is so well known it barely justifies repeating: the health tax he promised not to introduce, but did. The HST. The eco tax. The soaring power bills. The epic borrowing. The multiple boondoggles. The “wage freeze” that turns out not to apply to police, nurses, civil servants or anyone who actually gets paid by the government. The big bonus for eHealth workers for overseeing a billion dollars in wasted spending. Stop me before I break into tears.

Tim Hudak says he’ll end the agony, but can’t be believed. Sorry Tim, but it’s true. If the campaign platform recently released by the Tories was handed in as a project in a first-year finance class, it would be returned with suggestions that the author find another line of interest. Like line dancing; something that doesn’t involve numbers, or adding and subtracting. Mr. Hudak says he’ll raise spending on all the important programs, but make up for it by finding “waste”. We all know that isn’t going to happen. Politicians never find waste. What they find is that if they keep spending money, their chances of re-election improve. The federal Tories have been promising to find waste for five years now, and have jacked up spending every year.

It’s been widely understood that this election was the Tories’ to lose . . . and they’re determined to do exactly that. This is how the NDP might finally get another chance to form a government . . . perhaps the misery of the Rae experiment has finally been forgotten. Between McGuinty and Hudak, the NDP could run a cardboard cut-out of Jack Layton and be (significantly) more appealing to the average Ontario voter.

China admits it’s hard to hide 1000ft-long aircraft carrier

Filed under: China, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:44

China has finally gotten around to acknowledging that they’re rebuilding the former Soviet aircraft carrier for use by their navy:

Gen Chen Bingde refused to say when the carrier — a remodelled Soviet-era vessel, the Varyag — would be ready.

A member of his staff said the carrier would pose no threat to other nations.

The 300m (990ft) carrier, which is being built in the north-east port of Dalian, has been one of China’s worst-kept secrets, analysts say.

Gen Chen made his comments to the Chinese-language Hong Kong Commercial Daily newspaper.

Although the Chinese say that the ship, once ready for operations, won’t enter other countries’ territorial waters, keep in mind that China doesn’t have the same idea about maritime rights as others in the South China Sea region:

Earlier posts about the Shi Lang (nee Varyag) here.

Canadian troops complete last combat mission before withdrawal from Afghanistan

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:31

Susan Sachs reports on the conclusion of the last planned combat mission for Canadian troops ahead of withdrawal this summer:

More than five years after taking charge of security in one of the most violent regions in Afghanistan, Canadian troops wrapped up their final combat operation with a two-week sweep through a rural swath of Kandahar that was undisputed Taliban territory just a year ago.

The offensive, conducted with a bulked-up Afghan National Army brigade in the lead, marks Canada’s last days in the long and deadly war. All combat troops are set to withdraw this summer, 5½ years after the mission in Kandahar began.

Until the last soldier leaves, the danger that has stalked Canadian soldiers in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and still one of its strongholds, remains.

Members of the Royal 22nd Regiment will still be patrolling the volatile area, risking death by improvised explosive devices and operating isolated outposts up to the day they hand off their positions to U.S. soldiers.

“RAF’s new superfighter was thrashed in the very type of combat it is supposed to be best at by a 1970s-era plane”

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Middle East, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:24

Lewis Page talks about claims from a Pakistani Air Force fighter pilot that their F-16s had “shot down” Royal Air Force Typhoons in three separate air training exercises in Turkey.

The RAF Typhoon, formerly known as the Eurofighter, should nonetheless have been vastly superior in air-to-air combat whether BVR or close in within visual range (WVR). The cripplingly expensive, long-delayed Eurofighter was specifically designed to address the defects of its predecessor the Tornado F3 — famously almost useless in close-in, dogfighting-style air combat. The Typhoon was meant to see off such deadly in-close threats as Soviet “Fulcrums” and “Flankers” using short-range missiles fired using helmet-mounted sight systems: such planes were thought well able to beat not just Tornados but F-16s in close fighting, and this expectation was borne out after the Cold War when the Luftwaffe inherited some from the East German air force and tried them out in exercises.

Thus it is that huge emphasis was placed on manoeuvring capability and dogfighting in the design of the Eurofighter. The expensive Euro-jet was initially designed, in fact, as a pure fighter with no ground attack options at all — bomber capability has had to be retrofitted subsequently at still more expense. Despite lacking various modern technologies such as Stealth and thrust-vectoring the resulting Typhoon is generally touted as being one of the best air-to-air combat planes in the world right now. Certainly it is meant to be good in close fighting: it is armed with the Advanced Short Range Air to Air Missile (ASRAAM) which as its name suggests is intended for the close WVR fight.

Perhaps the account above is simply a lie, or anyway a bit of a fighter pilot tall story. But the pilot quoted will be easily identifiable inside his community if not to the outside world, and he could expect a lot of flak for telling a lie on such a matter in public. It seems likelier that the story is the truth as he perceived it: that the RAF’s new superfighter was thrashed in the very type of combat it is supposed to be best at by a 1970s-era plane, albeit much modernised.

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