Tag Archives: War

News

AC-130 gunships now mounting 105mm howitzer

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This is really cool. (H/T ECM)

This is the ‘Angel of Death’, the world’s biggest flying artillery gun – and the latest weapon being used by British and US Special Forces to defeat Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

[…]…the aircraft, which is rarely deployed in daylight, carries a powerful Howitzer 105mm field gun which can ‘vaporise’ targets at a range of 1,200 yards.

As the Hercules drops from 2,000ft to as low as 80ft above the battlefield, the Howitzer – normally used by ground troops – fires ten rounds a minute and has a back-up of three 25mm Gatling cannons spewing out 7,500 rounds every 60 seconds to produce the ultimate airborne gunship. Once a camera sited under the fuselage has fixed on the target, it sends the co-ordinates to an onboard computer – and the ‘Angel of Death’ is ready to unleash its deadly load.

[…]The high explosive 105mm shells, each packed with 5lb of TNT, rocket towards their target at 1,548ft per second.

On contact, the shells can destroy buildings and spread shrapnel over a ‘kill’ area of up to 1,500 yards.

Click through to see the photos – you have to see the photos! It’s awesome! This is why we need to develop weapons, and to keep funding defense research. The article has a lot more detail and even talks about how the thing has been used to produce results.

News

MUST-READ: FBI records show Howard Zinn was a communist

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From Accuracy in Media. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The prominent “progressive” historian Howard Zinn, whose books are force-fed to young people on many college campuses, was not only a member of the Moscow-controlled and Soviet-funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA) but lied about it, according to an FBI file released on Friday.

The file, consisting of three sections totaling 423 pages, was made available on the FBI’s website and released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from this writer.

Zinn taught in the political science department of Boston University for 24 years, from 1964 to 1988, and has been a major influence on the modern-day “progressive” movement that backed Barack Obama for president.

Although Zinn denied being a member of the CPUSA, the FBI file discloses that several reliable informants in the party identified Zinn as a member who attended party meetings as many as five times a week.

[…]The FBI file also includes information on Zinn’s pro-Castro activism and support for radical groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Progressive Labor Party (PLP), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and Black Panther Party. Much of the latter was in connection with Zinn’s support for a communist military victory in Vietnam. His dealings with the Communist regime in Hanoi included a visit to the communist capital.

Read the whole thing. This guy is the author of the most widely-used textbook on American history in the United States. And he’s a communist. This is what your children were learning in history classes.

Don’t believe me, listen to a debate

In case you would like to know how well Howard Zinn’s communist ideas hold up under rational scrutiny, you can spend some time listening to Dennis Prager debating him on the Dennis Prager radio show.

This clip has links to the rest of the 4-clip series.

The playlist is here.

And thanks to the amazing ECM for finding this amazing story.

Commentary

Scott Klusendorf confronts a “pro-life” nun who voted for Obama

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Pro-life debater Scott Klusendorf wrote this article on the Pro Life Training web site.

Excerpt:

Nun: If only our students were completely pro-life on all issues.  I am consistently for life, and that’s why I’m voting for Senator Obama.

Me: Sister?

Nun: That’s right, I’m for Obama.  He’s the real pro-life candidate.  Most people focus too much on abortion.  I’m pro-life and care about all life.  So does Obama.

Me: What do you mean people focus too much on abortion?1

Nun: I mean Bush with the war in Iraq has killed so many people there is no way I could vote for someone like Senator McCain, who will do the same thing.  How can any person who cares about life vote for such a man?

Me: Are you suggesting the President unjustly killed innocent people?  If so, how?

Nun: Yes I am!  Think of all those innocent women and children killed in Iraq—over a million of them since we invaded the place six years ago.

Me: Did you say over a million?  How did you come up with that number?

Nun: I heard it someplace.  Besides, war is a pro-life issue like abortion and right now it’s even worse than abortion.

Me: To be worse than abortion, how bad would an unjust war have to be?

Nun: Abortion, war, poverty—they are all bad.

I’m sure you all recognize the tendency of some people to refuse to make judgments like “greater than” and “less than” when they are debating – because to put numbers to different things and admit that one thing is much worse than another (or more likely) would undermine their view.

The fact of the matter is that 30,000 innocent civilians TOTAL being killed in the process of liberating an entire country and deposing a dangerous tyrant, is NOT the same as 1.2 million unborn babies being killed PER YEAR because their parents refuse to be inconvenienced by the consequences of their own  hedonistic behavior.

And not only are the numbers different but the justification for the taking of a life is different in each case, too. Just wars are fought because the loss of civilian lives is not as bad as the failure to restrain a more dangerous threat to peaceful democratic nations. For example, the deaths of innocent civilians in the fire-bombing of Dresden in order to defeat the tyrant Hitler. But in the case of abortion, the justification is just that the selfish pursuit of pleasure of the parents justifies the killing of an innocent unborn child.

I have always been concerned by naive pro-lifers who think that big government socialism would someone be the answer to the problem of what to do with helpless unborn children. “Social justice” they call it. Well “social justice” won the election in 2008, and now we have taxpayer-funded abortions. Why? Because the people who voted to grow the government didn’t want to be inconvenienced with children. But the unborn children never got to vote – they were just too small to count.