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From http://www.eyewitnesstohistory... :

On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted the first powered airplane 20 feet above a wind-swept beach in North Carolina. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. Three more flights were made that day with Orville's brother Wilbur piloting the record flight lasting 59 seconds over a distance of 852 feet.

That was even more unlike a 30 minute flight from NYC to Dallas than the SS2. It's a good thing you weren't around back then to troll the Wright brothers. Sigh.

Flying is still dangerous!
Thomas Selfridge (d Sep 17, 1908) was the first person to die in a crash of a powered aircraft. He was a passenger in the Wright brothers famous plane, and it was piloted by Orville Wright himself.

(paraphrase from Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Selfridge

An airplane that can get you from NYC to Dallas is unlike the SpaceShipTwo in nearly every possible way.

From http://www.eyewitnesstohistory... :

On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted the first powered airplane 20 feet above a wind-swept beach in North Carolina. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. Three more flights were made that day with Orville's brother Wilbur piloting the record flight lasting 59 seconds over a distance of 852 feet.

That was even more unlike a 30 minute flight from NYC to Dallas than the SS2. It's a good thing you weren't around back then to troll the Wright brothers. Sigh.

My recollection was that that was the one and only reason for his presence.
And it was lightnings, but I think he may have taught some corsair pilots as well.

And, so I looked it up.

According to this, it was corsairs first
http://www.charleslindbergh.co...
And this seconds it
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory...
and this says that it was corsairs, but the issue he solved was taking off with large bomb loads ( the corsair was designed as a fighter, but was in use with the Marines as the Navy didnt like it's landing characteristics )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

More people have been persecuted, hounded, ruined, tortured, burned, murdered, and just exterminated en-masse because of a book called the Bible than any other document in human history including Mein Kampf and Das Capital put together.

Just sayin' .

As long as your meaning is, "They were persecuted for believing in Judaism or Christianity," or for owning a Torah or Bible, very possibly.

Beginnings of Christian Martyrdom

In their very deaths they were made the subjects of sport: for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when the day waned, burned to serve for the evening lights. Nero offered his own garden players for the spectacle, and exhibited a Circensian game, indiscriminately mingling with the common people in the dress of a charioteer, or else standing in his chariot. For this cause a feeling of compassion arose towards the sufferers, though guilty and deserving of exemplary capital punishment, because they seemed not to be cut off for the public good, but were victims of the ferocity of one man."

WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES

A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

League of Militant Atheists
North Korea Ranked No. 1 for Christian Persecution
Persecuted and forgotten: Egypt's Christians
A Global Slaughter of Christians, but America’s Churches Stay Silent
Christian Persecution in China Despite Supposed Religious 'Freedom'
The Case Against the Nazis; How Hitler's Forces Planned To Destroy German Christianity

UNDERSTANDING ANTI-SEMITISM AND ITS HISTORY

The list is obviously much longer.

Since someone is practically certain to object along two lines, lets dispose of them now.

Yes, the Spanish Inquisition was terrible, it was also limited in scope.
The Crusades were a long delayed response to Muslim invasion of the Holy Land.

The First Battle of the Atlantic
British submarines in World War One
His German Imperial Majesty's U-Boats in WWI
WWI German submarine has underwater Lake Michigan grave
German WWI Submarines (Pictures)
U-boat Attack, 1916
Anti-Submarine Measures from World War I
Depth Charges

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-ship-hms-bounty-sinks-mutiny-pirates-caribbean-384716

If you go down to the sea, be prepared. Only a fool would go to sea aboard a vessel that isn't seaworthy. Only a fool - and the seas don't give a small rat's ass how much money you have, or how many "experts" agreed that it would be safe.

Even seaworthy vessels can go down, if not crewed by extremely competent AND lucky crewmembers:
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/titanic.htm

http://www.boatnerd.com/fitz/

Did I mention luck? Even the best of ships and the best of crews can be swallowed whole, and vanish without trace when their luck has run out.

That sounds eerily similar to what the king of England said a little over 200 years ago when tea was dumped in a harbor by some "criminals".

I would suggest that, since they're heading toward "universal" security measures, we take a cue from the Old West and require that everyone carry a sidearm.

You believe that urban myth that everybody carried guns in the Old West?
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/dodge.htm
"Dodge City, 1878. The sign warns visitors to check their guns."

  It's entirely possible those books burned with the White House in 1814.

  Quote from link:

  All thoughts of accommodation were instantly laid aside; the troops advanced forthwith into the town, and having first put to the sword all who were found in the house from which the shots were fired, and reduced it to ashes, they proceeded, without 'a moment's delay, to burn and destroy everything in the most distant degree connected with government. In this general devastation were included the Senate House, the President's palace,...Of the Senate house, the President's palace, the barracks, the dockyard, etc., nothing could be seen except heaps of smoking ruins."

SB

Our foreign policy in the area has really been fatally flawed since the inception of our country. I'm not sure there could be anything different that could be done to change that at this point in time. I mean Thomas Jefferson (our third president) created a Standing Navy and the US Marine forces specifically to deal with the Middle east (Tripoli- then capitol of the ottoman empire) because they were sending pirate ships along the US Atlantic coast and started capturing Private citizens and selling them as slaves. Jefferson asked the ambassador to Tripoli while he was the ambassador to France where they got the right to attack our ships and kidnap our people to sell into slavery and his reply was Allah gave them the right. (of course that was no different then using a god to justify anything else done which was common for the time)

Kuwait, Dubai, Jordan, and quite a few other territorial countries in the area (ottoman empire still) was/were major trade ports for the US and a natural extension of the Asian trade routes coming from China and India to the US. The Tea that we (our founding fathers) dumped into the Boston Harbor traveled by caravan to be loaded on a British flagged ship at the port of Kuwait. We have a history of supportive and mutual aid since the inception of our country as a whole as well as a history of discontent. After WWI and the fall of the ottoman empire, we fought in the league of nations to keep these areas independent and to create their own sovereignty. You've heard the story of Lawrence of Arabia, in which we cooped tribal and territorial leaders to help the allies in WWI under the promise of the creation of their sovereign and independent state.

So I guess I suggest that we are more or less making lemonade from a lot of lemons thrown our way with the middle east. I'm not sure we could ever un-flaw out foreign policy in the area because we would be forgetting what got us there in the first place and leaving allies out to dry (yes, Israel included), by leaving them unprotected from mutual aid agreements or missing the commercial financial support that their countries have grew around for more then 200 years (100 or so being under the ottoman empire).

Flawed probably isn't an accurate depiction of the situation even though it sounds obvious. Overly complicated and complications built on top of complications might be better. And yes, I admit that the US has done some extremely stupid things in the past. Most of the more recent ones pertained to the USSR but a lot of it came from early animosity to Europe throwing it's powers around too. One of the biggest problems we face or have faced in the past is the vast amounts or resources we have in the Americas (north and south) and how isolating ourselves (the US) from the rest of the world would more or less invites invasion for a lot of those resources. Imagine if the Incas or other indigenous cultures of south America were able to call up a neighboring civilization to come to their aid when the Spanish started enslaving them to steal the gold. Columbus and those who followed would never have been able to send the boats over fast enough with enough troops to conquer south America. This is why we need to not isolate ourselves and why we need to not only offer but expect help in return regardless of our ever needing it. When an ally goes down, we then know that we need to do something to help them while protecting ourselves. This may not be as much of an issue as it was 100 or 200 years ago, but it's something that has shaped our existence today and will effect it tomorrow too.

I understood campaigns like "loose lips sink ships" to be about discussing confidential military details, rather than undermining morale. There's a piece on it here. Some of it can be taken as for morale purposes, but in the main it seems to be about preserving secrets from the enemy. War bonds were financially motivated and though I had to look up "Rosie the Riveter" and "Wendy the Wielder" they seem to be focused on encouraging women in the workplace.

But all this is a little beside the point. I'm not contesting that there was government propaganda directed at the US public during WWII (though surely it required less effort to explain why a mobilised Germany was a threat than Iraq is), I'm just pointing out that selling military secrets to the enemy is an entirely different subject to manipulating public opinion to justify military action or funding.

Napalm bombs on Japan killed even more civilians than atomic weapons in Japan.
From globalsecurity.org:

"On 21 March 2000, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea issued a memorandum detailing records of "criminal acts against humanity" committed by United States troops during the three-year Korean War (1950-1953). The DPRK report stated that the United States killed peaceful citizens by indiscriminate bombing and naval bombardment against urban and rural areas in the North. According to the DPRK, from 11 July to 20 August 1951, more than 10,000 United States planes had conducted over 250 air raids on Pyongyang, dropping as many as 4,000 bombs, killing 4,000 civilians and wounding 2,500 more. From 11 to 12 July 1952, 400 United States planes dropped more than 6,000 napalm bombs and time-bombs, killing 8,000 civilians, including women and children. "Town and country were reduced to ashes and several million peaceable inhabitants killed", the Permanent Representative of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Li Hyong Chol, said. According to the DPRK report, Napalm and other bombs dropped by United States war planes totaled more than 600,000 tons, which was 3.7 times the 161,425 tons dropped over Japan during the Pacific War."

Also

"A single firebomb dropped from an airplane at low-altitude was capable of producing damage to a 2500-yd2 area. In targeted Japanese cities, napalm bombs burned out 40% of the land area. In a Japanese residential neighborhoods with wood and paper houses, there was no way to fight the fires. On March 9 and 10, 1945, US forces dropped more than 1,500 tons of napalm bombs, all produced at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, on Tokyo. The resulting firestorm destroyed enormous sections of the city."

See also http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/tokyo.htm where it states:

"Estimates of the number killed range between 80,000 and 200,000, a higher death toll than that produced by the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki six months later."

It took not one but two atomic bombs to convince the Japanese to surrender, and this was AFTER the horrendous firebombing.

Firebombing cities accomplished its purpose. From http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWfirestorm.htm :
"A wave of terror radiated from the suffering city and spread through Germany. Appalling details of the great fire was recounted. A stream of haggard, terrified refugees flowed into the neighbouring provinces. In every large town people said: "What happened to Hamburg yesterday can happen to us tomorrow". After Hamburg in the wide circle of the political and the military command could be heard the words: "The war is lost"."

So I ask, who are the terrorists?

The expansionistic prisoner of war torturing invaders, the ones dropping the napalm bombs on the invaders' civilian population, the ones ordering the dropping of napalm bombs, or the ones that voted into power the people that ordered the dropping of napalm bombs?

At some point citizens ARE responsible for the actions of their leaders. And yes, War is Hell.

...you're gonna have to fly it for more than a couple seconds and 7 feet off the ground.

The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet.

Patience, Grasshopper

"I wish somebody would kill Bush" doesn't seem like one.

A: Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Moreville, William de Traci and Richard Brito did it.

Can you name a non-aboriginal nation that was founded in North or South America before the United States in 1776? Didn't think so.

Yes I can, Vineland which is now called Nova Scotia.

I think you're thinking of this, from here

America thus joined in the carnage that had been ravaging Europe since 1914. Germany's renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare and the revelation of a proposed German plot to ally with Mexico against the US prompted Wilson's action. In January 1917 Germany declared all ships trading with Britain as targets including those of neutral countries. In February the British gave the American ambassador in London a copy of an intercepted German telegram. The telegram came from the German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmerman, to the German ambassador to Mexico. Zimmerman proposed that in the event of war with the US, Germany and Mexico would join in an alliance. Germany would fund Mexico's conflict with the US. With victory achieved, Mexico would regain her lost territories of Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. Release of the telegram ignited a public furor further inflamed by the loss of four US merchant ships and 15 American lives to German torpedo attacks.

Yes, that actually was initiated by the Mayor of New York, La Guardia, when he first took office.

Only took twenty years since the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire for someone to do something about it. Wonderful, mmm?

So does General Field Marshal Rommel

I guess companies tend to become a little greedy and overzealous given a chance.....