A friend of mine forwarded me this link to B-29 & P-51 WWII footage by the War Department.  It’s around 36 minutes in length, but I found it extremely interesting.  It includes live footage of the 3,000 mile round trip air assault against Japan with 3 bomber wings and a host of P-51s.

Be sure to browse the Internet Archive website as they have a ton of other stuff, including many old B&W sci-fi movies such as “Plan 9 from Outer Space“, “Night of the Living Dead“, “Killers from Space“, and many more.  They also have old TV episodes such as the first episode of the Beverly Hillbillies.  Due to our outrageous copyright laws, many of the television episodes had to substitute different sound tracks (including theme songs) because they couldn’t license the original sound track.

Enjoy!

The pilot episode of L5 was released, free to the public, last week.  It’s approx. 27 minutes in length and I thought it was excellent.  Here’s a synopsis directly from the L5 Series home page:

Imagine returning from an exhausting adventure only to find that your home is abandoned, empty. Not just your home, but your neighborhood, your city, in fact, everyone, everywhere, seems to be missing. This is what happens to the crew of the first manned mission to Barnard’s Star – they return after awakening from suspended animation to find that their ship-board AI has sent them on a relativistic tour of the stellar neighborhood while they slumbered, dilating time so severely that nearly 200 years have passed on Earth. After coming to, they discover their vessel is adrift at LaGrange point 5, within visual range of a vast O’neill cylinder-colony. The night side of the Earth shows no lights, and no one answers their calls across all frequencies. They have no choice but to dock with the colony and explore its cavernous interior in the hopes of finding help. When they find the colony to be airless and devoid of life, the remains of human civilization baking in the Sun for decades, their predicament becomes even more dire. Following in the traditions of great legendary hard science fiction, their exploration of this relic of their own civilization will take them on a trans-humanistic and spiritual sojourn.

The pilot episode of L5 can be viewed or downloaded here.

Secrecy News is a publication of the Federation of American Scientists.  It reports on new developments in government secrecy and provides public access to documentary resources on secrecy, intelligence and national security policy. It is written by Steven Aftergood.

One of the best resources provided by this blog are the analyses & reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS).  CRS is primarily known for “analysis that is authoritative, confidential, objective and nonpartisan.” Its highest priority is to ensure that Congress has 24/7 access to the nation’s best thinking.  As a taxpayer-funded organization within the Library of Congress, it’s certainly appropriate that ‘taxpayers’ should have access to these analyses and reports.  (We ‘taxpayers’ might as well read these, as it seems fairly apparent that few  – if any – in Congress spend much time reading them)

Here’s just a small sampling of CRS reports over the past few months:

• Representatives & Senators: Trends in Member Characteristics Since 1945 (2/17/12)
• The Federal Budget: Issues for FY2013 and Beyond (2/17/12)
• Reducing the Budget Deficit: Policy Issues (2/15/12)
• Previewing the Next Farm Bill (2/15/12)
• The Role of Local Food Systems in U.S. Farm Policy (1/24/12)
• Internet Governance and the Domain Name System: Issues for Congress (2/9/12)
• Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data (2/8/12)
• Changes in the Arctic: Background and Issues for Congress (2/7/12)
• Smart Meter Data: Privacy and Cybersecurity (2/3/12)
• Retirement Benefits for Members of Congress (1/7/11)
  
• Economic Downturns and Crime (12/19/11)
• U.S. Periods of War and Dates of Current Conflicts (12/29/11)
• Gun Control Legislation (11/7/2011)
• Military Retirement Reform: A Review of Proposals and Options for Congress (11/17/11)
• 2012 edition of the U.S. Army Weapon Systems handbook

You can subscribe to Secrecy News here.

Cheers!

VERY interesting intel newsletter from KGS that analyzes current international affairs or events affecting US national security interests (and without any of the hype and/or bias that’s present in most all other news sources).

I’ve been reading it for several years and have found it to be not only extremely accurate, but simply one of the best & easily accessible sources of information for non-DOD/non-Intel folks as to “what’s really going on” in Iran, Syria, Egypt, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere throughout the world.

You can either read the nightly reports directly on their website or subscribe to the newsletter via email here:   KGS NightWatch Newsletter

This past year our guinea hens managed to hatch AND raise 7 baby guineas on their own, of which 5 survived.  What follows are pics from all of 2011 and the last six just after our Feb 2012 snowstorm.  For most of the past 12 years that we’ve had these “strange” martian-like birds, we’ve had to gather up the eggs; hatch them in an incubator; and raise them ourselves until they were old enough to release with the other guineas.  I guess there’s a first time for everything, eh?