Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Nov 29, 1929: American explorer Richard E. Byrd and three companions make the first flight over the South Pole, flying a Ford Trimotor airplane named the Floyd Bennett from their base on the Ross Ice Shelf to the pole and back in 18 hours and 41 minutes. Byrd was promoted to the rank of rear admiral on his return to America.



Richard E. Byrd completes the first flight over the South Pole




Nov 29, 1961: Chimpanzee Enos became the first chimp to orbit the earth aboard a Mercury Atlas rocket. He completed his first orbit in 1 hour and 28.5 minutes. Scheduled to complete three orbits, but the mission was aborted after 2, due to 2 issues: capsule overheating and a malfunctioning "avoidance conditioning" test subjecting the primate to 76 electrical shocks. Enos died at Holloman Air Force Base of a non-space related case of dysentery on Nov 4, 1962.



Enos the Chimpanzee travels to space on NASA's Mercury Atlas 5




Nov 29, 1975: The first Red Flag aerial combat training exercise held at Nellis AFB and Gunnery Range by the 414th Combat Squadron near North Las Vegas, NV, began.



The 414th Combat Training Squadron conducts Red Flag exercises to provide aircrews the experience of multiple, intensive air combat sorties in the safety of a training environment. There are three iterations of Red Flag annually, one U.S. only, one open to FVEY (Five Eyes) participants and one that welcomes an expanded roster of international allies and partners. The training occurs at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada on the Nevada Test and Training Range, the U.S. Air Force’s premier military training area with more than 12,000 square miles of airspace and 2.9 million acres of land.


Nov 29, 1994: Michigan state radiological experts discovered highly radioactive material in a backyard shed. “The funny thing is, they only got the garbage, and the garbage got all the good stuff.” The archetypal American suburban Radioactive Boy Scout...


The Radioactive Boy Scout  (Harper's Magazine, 11/1998)

David Charles Hahn, the radioactive Boy Scout died in 2016 at age 39 from combined effects of alcohol, fentanyl, and diphenhydramine.


Let’s see: CIA-backed paramilitaries, seduced and abandoned after American objectives go unrealized, bite the living hell out of their former handlers? The song remains the same.


Dr. Orlando Bosch was a controversial figure accused of numerous crimes, including masterminding a deadly airline bombing. He was a pediatrician and a militant anti-Castro activist. Bosch was arrested in 1968 for a bazooka attack on a Polish freighter in Miami, for which he was jailed, but violated parole and fled to Venezuela in 1974 at the invitation of fellow exile militant Luis Posada Carriles who was another Cuban exile militant then serving as the head of DISIP, the Venezuelan intelligence service. Arrested for a bombing, he was released in exchange for surrendering his munitions, and moved to Chile. The US government considered him to have been involved in multiple bombings while there. In 1976 he was arrested for an assassination attempt in Costa Rica; the US declined an extradition offer, and he was sent to the Dominican Republic.

He founded the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) in 1976, which was responsible for several attacks that year. He was also accused of being the mastermind for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455, a Cuban civilian airliner, on October 6, 1976 in which all 73 people on board were killed.

"You have to fight violence with violence. At times you cannot avoid hurting innocent people."
—Orlando Bosch, 1979 statement while jailed in Venezuela.

Bosch, Posada, and two others were arrested and tried for the bombing in Venezuela. Posada escaped from prison, while Bosch was acquitted by a Venezuelan military court in 1986. The other two men, both employees of Posada, were sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Upon his return to the USA in 1988, Bosch was arrested for parole violations. The Justice Department, which considered him a terrorist, sought to deport him. He was allowed to stay, and later granted residency, by President George H. W. Bush after a widespread lobbying campaign that included Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the president's son Jeb Bush. Bosch died in Miami at age 84 in 2011.

Long View: How the Fight Against Castro Once Terrorized U.S. Cities


This is your Captain, incoming cosmic rays...Please Standby...Updating...




Europe isn’t afraid it can’t catch up, Europe is afraid the mask has slipped. The world can finally see what the continent has become, a former power now reduced to a dependent market, a protectorate of America, and a future mortgaged on the altar of its own imperial delusions. The real panic in Europe is the horror of realizing no one even pretends Europe is a player anymore. And now that the bill for decades of outsourced power has arrived, Europe simply can’t pay it.

What truly terrifies European leaders is that Trump will download the humiliation of Ukraine’s defeat onto Europe. The U.S. will walk away claiming it tried its best. Europe will be left holding the corpse of a proxy war it could never win, defending a narrative it no longer believes, and answering to populations who will ask why their industries, incomes, security, and futures were sacrificed for someone else’s geopolitical adventure. There will be hell to pay.

The WSJ article reads like a continent waking from a 30-year hallucination. The "battle lines of a new world order" aren’t being drawn, they were drawn long ago. The U.S. and China negotiate trade architecture without Europe. The U.S. and Russia security architecture terms without Europe. Even Xi–Trump summits reshape European fate more than any EU decision does. Europe is in the room only as ornamental furniture.

The USA walks away. Russia surges. China rises. And Europe, stripped of industry, energy, agency, and relevance is left staring into the black mirror of history asking: "How did we become the continent that destroyed ourselves so others could play the game?" Europe is on its way of becoming a historic theme park.


Europe Fears It Can’t Catch Up in Great Power Competition


Trump closed down Venezuelan airspace with a tweet. No one else on Earth could have done that. He must be serious as he also posted to his X account. Operation Southern Spear is getting spicy.