sense and nonsense

– Read more of the interview –
#1 Obama makes sense. Yes.
#2 Some of the comments are rational.
12-21-2016

On 9/11/01, as chaos ensued, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was sitting in her F-16 jet at Andrews Air Force Base with very specific orders.

Bring down United Airlines Flight 93 ‘by any means possible.’

She and Col. Marc Sasseville were given those orders that day, even though they were sitting in planes without any live ammunition.  That meant, they both had to plan to ram the hijacked plane with their own jets.

For more than 10 years, Lt. Penney (now a Major), didn’t talk about about her experience that day , but in 2011 she gave an interview to C-SPAN, an interview and a story we had not heard until now.

She talked about how Col. Sasseville was ready to ram the cockpit, and she would aim for the tail.

She told the Washington Post:

“We had to protect our airspace any way we could.”

But neither pilot would have to give their lives that day after getting word that Flight 93 went down in a field in Pennsylvania.  

She told the Washington Post: 

“I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off.  The real heroes are the passengers on Flight 93 who were willing to sacrifice themselves.  I was just an accidental witness to history.”

But they were still ready to give their lives that day, like so many others were ready to and did.  And for that, they are all heroes.

And there was one more twist to the story. From the Washington Post: 

“Later, as the Penney family checked in on each other from around the country, they marveled at the other fateful twist on the extraordinary events: the possibility that Penney’s own father could well have been in the cockpit of her airliner target.  

John Penney was a captain at United Airlines at the time. He had been flying East Coast routes all the previous month.  The daughter had no way of knowing whether the father was airborne or not.  

“We talked about the possibility that I could have been on the plane,” Col. John Penney said. “She knew I was flying that kind of rotation.  But we never fell down and emotionally broke apart or anything like that.  She’s a fighter pilot, I’m a fighter pilot.”

– and more –

I suppose your first inclination is to apply this to the current President of the United States of America. But, try to cast aside hypocrisy and bias; this applies to ALL of them (including the non-men).

The National Park Service announced last week it was ending the so-called Water Bottle Ban, which the Obama administration implemented in 2011 to “reduce our carbon footprint.”

“In its commitment to providing a safe and world-class visitor experience, the National Park Service is discontinuing Policy Memorandum 11-03, commonly referred to as the ‘Water Bottle Ban,'” the agency said in a statement.

The National Park Service said the policy was counterproductive and only 23 out of 417 parks implemented the ban.

“The 2011 policy, which encouraged national parks to eliminate the sale of disposable water bottles, has been rescinded to expand hydration options for recreationalists, hikers, and other visitors to national parks,” the agency said. “The ban removed the healthiest beverage choice at a variety of parks while still allowing sales of bottled sweetened drinks. The change in policy comes after a review of the policy’s aims and impact in close consultation with Department of the Interior leadership.”