What would be the use? A combined currency policy might be interesting for international trade, but i don’t think Oz and Nooz are close enough to give the people any benefit from a common currency. It’s not that Aussies hop in their car and cross the border with New Zealand to buy some cheap booze, while Kiwis take their lunch break to fill up their car’s fuel tanks with cheap Australian fuel.

You know that GWB has been increasing government rather than diminishing it, don’t you?

I would hardly call some of hitler’s ideals “right wing”…limiting personal freedom fo rthe good of the furher and fatherland? socialist….National socialist… He was as right wing as Stalin.

Ah, yes. Hitler’s visions of a racially pure aristocracy ruling over those racially less is in what sense an interpretation of Marx? The whole foundation of the nazi ideology (unequality among humans because of racial/national backgrounds) is about as far away from any socialist thought you can get. The ‘socialist’ in the name of the NSDAP was purely a reminder of the vague origins of that party in the disgruntled low-class parts of the German society, just like you will find many present-day fascists and nazis with a blue collar background. Nazism was extremely conservative, actually aspiring a return to a (romantical rather than historical) pre-Christian socio-cultural society. I think the term ‘reversative’ could be coined here (you can apply the same label then to Bin Laden and the like).

Besides, if you judge the sides of the political spectrum by limiting personal freedoms, i guess you should consider Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, John (? not sure) Ashcroft and GW Bush to be some of the more leftist Americans of the last 50 years. Limiting personal freedoms and liberties to the further good of the fatherland… i can think of a few things to replace ‘fatherland’ with.

And Stalin can easily be judged right-wing rather than left wing. Under his rule, the inner core of the Communist Party grew out into a new sort of bourgeoisie not all that unsimilar with Czarist nobility. Add to that the fact that Stalin’s policies were nationalistic more than anything else, he can pretty easily be discarded as right-wing. Sure, it was a dictatorship in which the economy was run by the state. Not really different from all those right-wing banana republics.

Just found a list, in a pretty old database floating on my HD. It only gives 19 RT-33s (no new ones compared to the ones Fantasma already posted), and the following 134 ‘regulars’:

58-0599, 58-0515, 51-17545, 51-4232, 58-0639, 58-0520, 58-0641, 51-4146
58-0597, 58-0596, 58-0561, 58-0519, 58-0517, 58-0516, 58-0642, 51-4093,
58-0594, 51-9039, 50-0430, 50-0434, 50-0435, 51-4064, 51-4065, 51-4091, 56-1755, 56-1592, 58-0645, 58-0691, 58-0687, 58-0686, 58-0683, 58-0680, 58-0646, 56-3663, 53-5118, 53-5490, 52-9881, 52-9900, 52-9913, 52-9925, 52-9955, 52-9962, 53-4902, 52-9561, 53-5029, 51-9254, 53-5125, 53-5126, 53-5155, 53-5223, 53-5353, 53-5265, 53-5328, 53-5488, 53-4916, 51-17498, 51-4510, 51-4513, 51-6577, 51-6713, 51-6714, 51-6717, 51-6771, 58-0602, 52-9876, 57-0755, 51-17450, 51-17514, 51-17521, 51-17549, 51-17550, 51-17555, 51-17556, 51-8929, 51-9038, 51-17449, 54-1556, 52-9805, 53-5845, 53-5889, 53-5890, 53-5893, 54-1614, 53-5801, 54-1575, 54-1583, 53-6131, 53-6129, 53-6082, 53-6006, 53-5903, 53-6000, 53-5964, 54-1606, 53-5494, 54-1574, 53-5493, 53-5787, 53-5496, 51-6867, 53-5492, 55-4951, 53-5981, 53-4947, 53-5782, 53-5629, 53-5784, 53-5780, 53-5777, 53-5738, 53-5737, 53-5736, 53-5786

And the following Canadian-built T-33ANs:
21269, 21496, 21397, 21494, 21472, 21501, 21469, 21419, 21415, 21382,
21367, 21365, 21053, 21324, 21037, 21131, 21219, 21519, 21355, 21528, 21061, 21596

I think the confusion gets best if you also take the machines into consideration which did go to Greece (and Turkey as well), but never actually flew but only served for spares. I think quite a number of ex-German T-33s met this fate for starters, but i have little substantial on it.

Ja, that EC-130V was bought by the Coast Guard after they had borrowed a few E-2s from the Navy, and really liked the experience. So they had one of their HC-130Hs converted with a rotodome. It was retired because operating and maintaining it was too expensive for a small organisation like the Coast Guard. Besides, in the War on Drugs it had been made sure already that other aircraft (mostly USN E-2Cs operating from Puerto Rico and Curacao) took over the anti-dope AEW role.

Deino, when looking for funny Herks i’m sure you came across the Credible Sports ones? These were two VTOL machines ment to free the hostages during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, but they canned the project to have the hostage-rescue fail another way. It did fly though, and one of the aircraft (after having been de-modified) is now at the Robins AFB museum in Georgia – ELP and/or Phantom probably have pics of it. Just do a google search on Credible Sport C-130, that should work.

The same has been puzzling me on this side of the pond Steve! You Brits all seem to use massive telescopes as your weapon of choice on trips, which i personally find incredible. Of course their magnification and light is excellent, but they are so incredibly cumbersome. On expeditionary trips we usually make sure we’ve got one telescope per car (30/120 or something like that), but the rest is all 20×60 and the likes. They are just so much handier. I would hate to try and read a landing Italian Starfighter’s Mickey Mouse-number with a scope like yours. Nor would it be something i’d happily climb up a tree with (may the Bitburg tree never be forgotten), let alone something really high and windy (like a building crane or smokestack, both pretty common near Russian airbases). Just too much of a hassle, and i personally think the extra magnification isn’t necessary all that often. I can hardly ever use my 20x60s at maximum range because of heatwaves.

I’ve had two of those odd-looking monoculairs. They are Russian-made (well, i got both as USSR-built ones) with a bayonet fitting to replace the forward lens, so you either had a 12×50 or a 20×60. Most spotters never used the 12x lense at all (except maybe as a magnifying glass), but as 20×60 mono it was great. Small, light, very easy to hold steady/jam into a stand to keep it even steadier, and a great toy to juggle with if you got bored. These monos were basically half the binos lots of Dutch spotters still have – the Tento (and equivalent) 20x60s, which i mostly use now. The old mono is in my car (to be replaced shortly), my first mono fell out of my pocket when i had rolled it in a sock to isolate it a bit 🙁 (winter-spotting, i’m sure you know).

Funny.
Here we have a bunch of right-wingers acting all pathetic and threatened, sulking that they are looked upon as ‘evil’ by certain people/society as a whole/whoever (please specify, i never get this). Yet in the same post leftists are proclaimed as do-gooders?

Oh, and Minidoh: Hitler and Mussolini were right-wing. There’s plenty of evil on all sides.