Everyone talks about being President of the United States one day, presumably because they like to think of themselves sitting in the Oval Office issuing Executive Orders for Free Pizza on Tuesdays and sending the military to bomb the house of the guy that gave you a swirly in 7th grade. What no one talks about, however, is just how hard the job of being in charge of 300 million people really is. For these five guys, it was harder than most, because they were dropped into a crap sandwich almost from the moment they were sworn in… [Read more…]
5 Ridiculous Plane Crashes That Were Easily Preventable
Airplane crashes and accidents are horrific things, involving exploded and smashed things that would make Michael Bay blush, as well as high body counts. Usually, there is a chain of events that have to occur before any sort of disaster, but especially aircraft accidents. If anything in the chain is done differently, the accident doesn’t happen. In most cases, the circumstances of the accident are beyond that which anyone could have foreseen or stopped.
And then there’s the accidents that if someone hadn’t been asleep at the wheel, wouldn’t have gone down at all. [Read more…]
The Brave, The Bold, The Incredibly Stupid: 5 “Heroic” Charges That Ended in Disaster
We’ve all seen it in movies: the good guys appear to be seconds from defeat, surrounded and outnumbered. Then, just when all hope is lost, reinforcements come over the horizon, and the bugler sounds the charge as dramatic music plays and the bad guys get a swift kick to the seat of the pants. Hell, even history, the greatest of all storytellers, is littered with stupidly awesome charges that won the day, such as the story of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, who found himself at the command of the 20th Maine Regiment on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg, weathering repeated charges by Confederate soldiers. With ammunition supplies almost exhausted, and retreat not being an option, Chamberlain decided to take the fight to the enemy. With Bayonets. [Read more…]