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If you ever wanted your very own fighter plane or cargo jet here's your chance. The government is auctioning off about half its stock of retired cold war aircraft from the bone yard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on the south side of Tucson this coming week. The Air Force saved these planes for spares, so a good many of them are missing pieces, even major pieces like the entire fuselage in a few cases. Some of them are over 50 years old. None of them are in flying condition. Since scrap metal prices are high, the government hopes to get a good price for these old junkers. A piece of our history is disappearing, but perhaps one we should not mourn too much.
The lesser of two evils or not? The raid on the FLDS compound in Texas apparently was touched off by a fraudulent call from a troubled woman living in another state. Clearly itching for a chance to strike, child protective services in Texas, like G.W. and Iraq, moved in perhaps knowing in advance that the information was bogus. (Child protective services has no caller ID service? Doubtful.) Then rather than looking for persons who matched the one who made the call, they took all the women and all the children into custody. I don't think there is any question that what the State of Texas did was unconstitutional, but scarcely anyone believes that the abuse they were looking for wasn't happening. It's not as if the people in the compound weren't trained to lie about who they were, their relationships and so on. They have essentially been hiding their personal lives since the moment the Mormon Church decided it had to give up polygyny and make peace with the rest of the country. I suspect that DNA testing isn't going to be as easy as the state of Texas hopes; not that it wouldn't work in the end, but it might take a long time to sort out. Just looking at the women heading into and out of the courtrooms you can see that after a 100 years the whole community is badly inbred. Depending on how many women there were when the sect split off, and how closely those women were related, their mitochondrial DNA may not be much help. The state of Texas and its courts will cheerfully pretend nothing was wrong with what they did, and the mess will eventually have to go into Federal court which all of us will have to pay for. I don't like anything about the FLDS, but I'm not very happy with Texas right now either.
The lesser of two evils or not? The raid on the FLDS compound in Texas apparently was touched off by a fraudulent call from a troubled woman living in another state. Clearly itching for a chance to strike, child protective services in Texas, like G.W. and Iraq, moved in perhaps knowing in advance that the information was bogus. (Child protective services has no caller ID service? Doubtful.) Then rather than looking for persons who matched the one who made the call, they took all the women and all the children into custody. I don't think there is any question that what the State of Texas did was unconstitutional, but scarcely anyone believes that the abuse they were looking for wasn't happening. It's not as if the people in the compound weren't trained to lie about who they were, their relationships and so on. They have essentially been hiding their personal lives since the moment the Mormon Church decided it had to give up polygyny and make peace with the rest of the country. I suspect that DNA testing isn't going to be as easy as the state of Texas hopes; not that it wouldn't work in the end, but it might take a long time to sort out. Just looking at the women heading into and out of the courtrooms you can see that after a 100 years the whole community is badly inbred. Depending on how many women there were when the sect split off, and how closely those women were related, their mitochondrial DNA may not be much help. The state of Texas and its courts will cheerfully pretend nothing was wrong with what they did, and the mess will eventually have to go into Federal court which all of us will have to pay for. I don't like anything about the FLDS, but I'm not very happy with Texas right now either.