True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and fraud investigator Gregg
Phillips sat down with The Epoch Times this weekend for an update on the
ballot trafficking investigations.
Catherine Engelbrecht announced that her organization now have video footage of the ballot boxes from Green Bay, Wisconsin.
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Catherine and Gregg claim that Obama-affiliated NGOs spent billions to steal the 2020 elections.
Catherine also said True the Vote is working with at least two local law enforcement agencies in the state.
Catherine Engelbrecht: On balance, we are going to
look back at this and a lot of what happened was the result of Americans
in their spirit knowing something is going so wrong. Where do we start
looking? And there wasn’t clarity and passionate people were trying to
figure this out… Where we find ourselves now is Americans are awake and
they’re increasingly awake. Hopefully what we are putting together
they are going to be able to see and feel and have that belief that will
encourage them. Their guts are right. This is happening. It’s
happening at a national scale…
…We just got Green Bay video. Or Brown County Wisconsin a week ago. So, it’s coming…
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Gregg Phillips listed four points that will make a difference in cleaning up US elections.
Gregg Phillips: I think there’s going to be some
very sophisticated technologies that are going to be employed from teams
like ours and others that are going to come around and really make a
big difference… Those four pillars.
** If they clean up the voter rolls. Do a meaningful job cleaning up the voter rolls.
** If they’ll stop all this mail-in balloting.
** If they’ll get rid of the drop boxes.
** And make these serious crimes. Make people pay for this stuff
Those four things will go a long way for cleaning up the problems that we’re seeing.
And then Catherine Engelbrecht announced True the Vote was working with
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Catherine Engelbrecht: Wisconsin… They’re making
great strides and investigations are ongoing. We arae now working with
two local law enforcement agencies so we’re excited about that.
Michigan, we’re just starting to scratch the surface of Michigan.
This is good news for Wisconsin patriots who are concerned about free elections in the state.
Story number one: back to a time when U.S. youngsters had guts to fight for their Country and their fellow mates.
See what the two stories have in common at the end!
A MUST READ
STORY NUMBER ONE
World War II produced many heroes. One such man was Lieutenant Commander Butch O'Hare.
He was a fighter pilot assigned to the aircraft carrier Lexington in the South Pacific.
One day his entire squadron was sent on a mission. After he was airborne, he looked at his fuel gauge and realized that someone had forgotten to top off his fuel tank.
He would not have enough fuel to complete his mission and get back to his ship.
His flight leader told him to return to the carrier. Reluctantly, he dropped out of formation and headed back to the fleet.
As he was returning to the mother ship, he saw something that turned his blood cold; a squadron of Japanese aircraft was speeding its way toward the American-fleet.
The American fighters were gone on a sortie, and the fleet was all but defenseless. He couldn't reach his squadron and bring them back in time to save the fleet. Nor could he warn the fleet of the approaching danger. There was only one thing to do. He must somehow divert them from the fleet.
Laying aside all thoughts of personal safety, he dove into the formation of Japanese planes. Wing-mounted 50 caliber's blazed as he charged in, attacking one surprised enemy plane and then another. Butch wove in and out of the now broken formation and fired at as many planes as possible until all his ammunition was finally spent.
Undaunted, he continued the assault. He dove at the planes, trying to clip a wing or tail in hopes of damaging as many enemy planes as possible, rendering them unfit to fly.
Finally, the exasperated Japanese squadron took off in another direction.
Deeply relieved, Butch O'Hare and his tattered fighter limped back to the carrier.
Upon arrival, he reported in and related the event surrounding his return.. The film from the gun-camera mounted on his plane told the tale. It showed the extent of Butch's daring attempt to protect his fleet. He had, in fact, destroyed five enemy aircraft. This took place on February 20, 1942, and for that action Butch became the Navy's first Ace of W.W.II, and the first Naval Aviator to win the Medal of Honor.
A Year later Butch was killed in aerial combat at the age of 29. His hometown would not allow the memory of this WW II hero to fade, and today, O'Hare airport in Chicago is named in tribute to the courage of this great man.
So, the next time you find yourself at O'Hare International, give some thought to visiting Butch's memoria l displaying his statue and his Medal of Honor. It's located between Terminals 1 and 2.
STORY NUMBER TWO:
Many years ago, Al Capone virtually owned Chicago. Capone wasn't famous for anything heroic. He was notorious for enmeshing the windy city in everything from bootlegged booze and prostitution to murder.
Capone had a lawyer nicknamed "Easy Eddie." He was Capone's lawyer for a good reason. Eddie was very good! In fact, Eddie's skill at legal manoeuvring kept Big Al out of jail for a long time.
To show his appreciation, Capone paid him very well.. Not only was the money big, but Eddie got special dividends, as well. For instance, he and his family occupied a fenced-in mansion with live-in help and all of the conveniences of the day. The estate was so large that it filled an entire Chicago City block.
Eddie lived the high life of the Chicago mob and gave little consideration to the atrocity that went on around him.
Eddie did have one soft spot, however. He had a son that he loved dearly. Eddie saw to it that his young son had clothes, cars, and a good education. Nothing was withheld. Price was no object.
And, despite his involvement with organized crime, Eddie even tried to teach him right from wrong. Eddie wanted his son to be a better man than he was.
Yet, with all his wealth and influence, there were two things he couldn't give his son; he couldn't pass on a good name or a good example.
One day, Easy Eddie reached a difficult decision. Easy Eddie wanted to rectify wrongs he had done.
He decided he would go to the authorities and tell the truth about Al "Scarface" Capone, clean up his tarnished name, and offer his son some resemblance of integrity. To do this, he would have to testify against The Mob, and he knew that the cost would be great. So, he testified.
Within the year, Easy Eddie's life ended in a blaze of gunfire on a lonely Chicago Street. But in his eyes, he had given his son the greatest gift he had to offer, at the greatest price he could ever pay.. Police removed from his pockets a rosary, a crucifix, a religious medallion, and a poem clipped from a magazine.
The poem read:
"The clock of life is wound but once, and no man has the power to tell just when the hands will stop, at late or early hour. Now is the only time you own. Live, love, toil with a will. Place no faith in time. For the clock may soon be still."
SO WHAT DO THESE TWO STORIES HAVE TO DO WITH EACH OTHER?
2000 Mules,
a 90-minute documentary produced by Dinesh D’Souza, is the visual tip
of the ballot trafficking iceberg based on the digital evidence
collected by True the Vote (TTV) and OPSEC. Utilizing geospatial technology to ping cellphones using data from apps, Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of TTV,
coordinated with Gregg Phillips’ OPSEC team of cyber analysts to
establish a “pattern of life.” They then corroborated those anonymous
cellphone data trails with publicly available dropbox surveillance videos. Phillips has been doing highly specialized work on elections globally for forty years but the technology used in this project has only been around for the past few years.
The AP published a “hit piece” on May 3, attempting to expose TTV’s “flawed analysis of cellphone location data and ballot drop box surveillance footage”
presented in 2000 Mules. We will examine those claims, weaving in
information from the movie and conversations with Engelbrecht over the
weekend.
Notably,
the AP story states neither D’Souza nor Engelbrecht responded to “a
request for comment.” At least in Engelbrecht’s case, she was given
little to no time to respond. She “received the request for comment at 11 p.m., and this story was published the next day.”
Is Geospatial Data with Cellphones Precise?
“Cellphone data is like digital DNA,”
Engelbrecht explained. A court case on the precision of this technology
makes that claim difficult to dispute. In response to the 2016 Supreme
Court case, Carpenter v. United States, Justice Roberts wrote a 2018 opinion in which he describes the level of precision tracing afforded by pinging a cellphone using geofencing technology.“Accordingly, when the Government tracks the location of a cell phone,” writes Roberts, “It achieves near perfect surveillance as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.” Two of the most striking paragraphs from his 2018 opinion are captured below:
Justice Roberts/2018 Opinion/Carpenter v. United States
Much of the premise of the AP story is built around proof that
cellphone data is not as precise as Justice Roberts describes in his
opinion. Notably, Engelbrecht mentions in the movie that their data in Georgia was used by law enforcement as a test case to help law enforcement solve a cold murder case of a young girl.
Atlanta Crime/2000 Mules/Test Case
Methodology of the TTV/OPSEC Investigation
Ballot trafficking is defined as the paid collection and casting or
delivery of a ballot by an unauthorized third party. In the 2020
election, multiple ballots were cast to dropboxes by many “mules” in
numerous states and jurisdictions. It is illegal in all states to be
paid for casting a ballot. Individuals or mules were paid $10 or more
per ballot—according to witness interviews—to “pick up ballots from stash houses run by NGOs to run them to dropboxes.” Engelbrecht states in the documentary, “So
you have the collectors, on the one hand, you have the stash houses,
which are the nonprofits, and then you have the mules that are doing the
drops.”
The criteria used to qualify as a ballot trafficker
were purposely conceived by TTV to rule out false positives. In other
words, TTV/OPSEC sought to avoid capturing individuals in their geo
tracing that were merely passing by or who did not approach the dropbox.
The mules also had to satisfy particular standards to be qualified as
bonafide mules.
According to Engelbrecht, they set out to allow the “data to tell the tale.” Phillips explains in the movie, “We
put together a plan to see where the data would take us. Our final
decision was that the traffickers had to have been to a dropbox space
and five or more visits to one of the one or more of these
organizations.” Engelbrecht adds, “Those were the outliers. It was such an aberrant pattern.” Phillips introjects, “The
fact of the matter is, these techniques are used every single day by
law enforcement, intelligence community, [and] the Department of
Defense.”
As such, their approach was conservative, meant to catch the worst offenders, according to Phillips:
“We want to absolutely ensure that we
don’t have false positives, meaning including people that should not
have been included. We’re not in any way saying that this is all there
is. We’re just saying that based on our criteria that we identified, in
Atlanta, 242 people who went to an average of 24 drop boxes in eight
organizations during a two-week period.”
Atlanta Mules/2000 Mules
The team targeted swing states where the election was decided, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. They collected data from October 1 through the election in all of the states, and in Georgia, the data was collected between October 1 and the January 6 runoff. In the Atlanta metro
area, they targeted 309 dropboxes, some in suburban areas. They
virtually fenced off (geofenced) the dropboxes to limit their collection
of cellphone pings to those who entered the space and approached the
dropbox. They also geofenced and pinged phones that approached or
entered the identified “organizations (NGOs) across the country.” They
bought 10 trillion signals, more than a petabyte of data, during the
course of the investigation.
When I asked Engelbrecht about the claims in the AP story that
innocent people may have been caught up in their data, she said their
methodology addressed those pitfalls:
“Of course, there are ways to
eliminate passers-by and county workers, of course, there are ways to
confirm that the people in the videos are (or are not) mules. Larry
Campbell, dropping off 6 ballots for his big family, wouldn’t be in our
study. Going once to a dropbox wasn’t in our study. Our mules averaged
38 dropbox visits and 8 NGO visits. Any other combination (ex. going to
NGOs and USPS boxes, for example, wouldn’t have been in our study. Or
going to 100 dropboxes, but no NGOs. They weren’t in our study.) That’s
how we know this is the tip of the iceberg.”
In the pattern of life below, the blue tracks are the pattern of
travel by the individual in the course of one day. The orange dots are
the dropboxes, and the house icons are the NGOs.
A Day In The Life Of a Mule/2000 Mules/Georgia
Phillips and Engelbrecht explain using the graphic above. Engelbrecht describes the things they looked for:
“Higher dropbox visits and the
elements that are additive. Here the going to the nonprofits, the
ability to identify the pattern of approach to a dropbox and that it is
going not past a dropbox and on but directly to a dropbox and back to
another point and then to another dropbox.”
Phillips:
“What you see here on the screen is a
single person on a single day in Atlanta, GA. They went to 28 drop
boxes and five organizations in one day. The individual, to get to some
of these dropboxes, you had to be intentional— to get off the highway,
to get to the dropbox, you had to go on surface streets, you have to
turn in somewhere in order to get to those drop boxes. The circles
represent where the ballots originate, the stash houses where the
ballots are collected and handed to the mules.”
Concerning AP’s recounting of Pennsylvania Sen. Sharif Street’s claims that he was “confident
he was counted as several of the 1,155 anonymous “mules’, even though
he didn’t deposit anything into a dropbox at that time period,” Engelbrecht’s response was as follows:
“We have been very precise in what
we’ve said. The writer makes claims and then debunks those claims with
what we’ve actually said (in our testimony). If the Senator was going
back and forth between NGOs and dropboxes, and if he did more than 10
times, then it is possible he would be in our study. Removing him still
leaves 1100+ mules. Oh, and, very important, driving by dropbox isn’t a
thing. You have to get out of your car and walk up to it. That’s what we
looked at in the study.”
Riots and Traffickers: Data Doesn’t Lie
Additionally, OPSEC collected evidence suggesting
some of the mules also participated in the violent Antifa riots earlier
in the year. As D’Souza introjected, the likelihood of left-leaning
participation in both is a much more likely hypothesis. Phillips states:
“There were several different violent
BLM Antifa riots in Atlanta, and in one of them, we had three dozen of
our mules participate in these violent riots. There’s an organization
that tracks the device IDs. Across all violent protests around the
world, we took a look at our 242 mules in Atlanta, and sure enough,
dozens and dozens and dozens of our mules show up on the ACLED databases.”
The AP story attempts to convince readers the theory of there being
an intersection between mules and BLM rioters falls flat unless you
believe the data collected by the Armed Conflict Location & Event
Data Project (ACLED) is bogus. You would also have to believe the same
geofencing technology used by the CIA, the FBI, or the Department of
Defense is also flawed and imprecise. If that isn’t enough to convince,
just read the 2019 NYTimes story
on cellphone geolocation tracking. Moreover, the data combined with a
robust law enforcement investigation with witness interviews would help
to further substantiate TTV’s findings.
Raffensperger Does Not Have TTV Video
The AP story contends Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger’s
office investigated one of the surveillance videos circulated by True
the Vote saying it found the man was dropping off ballots for himself
and his family. Engelbrecht told UncoverDC while TTV has offered the
video surveillance copies to the SOS, Raffensperger does not have TTV
footage:
“They only have geospatial data. The
GBI already has access to all the video because it’s a state video. We
went through everything and offered to provide video, but until the
subpoenas, they’ve never indicated what or how they wanted to receive
info, and we didn’t want to do anything incorrectly. That’s how I am
certain the comment about the Raffensperger having our video is
inaccurate.”
UncoverDC reached out to Raffensperger’s office on Thursday about the
video footage claim but has received no response as of this
publication.
TTV has 4 million minutes of surveillance video from around the
country from open records requests. According to Phillips, some of the
video surveillance was turned off in Arizona. In Wisconsin—despite rules
requiring video surveillance—surveillance of dropboxes was not done
there. Importantly, in the places where TTV has video, they have the
geolocation data that correlates with the video surveillance footage,
further corroborating the evidence.
Gloves and Photos at Dropboxes
One of the AP claims is that wearing gloves to avoid fingerprints is “pure speculation.” The ballot trafficking case
in Arizona did, in fact, involve fingerprint evidence from the ballots.
The evidence is most likely under seal. Nevertheless, whether the
hypothesis about the connection between the case and the sudden wearing
of gloves elsewhere is true or not, it is still unlikely that a universe
of innocent people would be wearing surgical gloves or taking photos at
dropboxes when delivering multiple ballots at 3 in the morning. It just
isn’t normal behavior.
Signature Verification Standards and Voter Rolls
The AP maintains all is well with absentee ballots concerning signature verification. Voter rolls
in the U.S. are notoriously poorly maintained and updated. Engelbrecht
and Phillips discuss poorly maintained voter rolls at length in their testimony
in front of Wisconsin legislators. It is very tough to conduct clean
elections when your voter rolls are populated with dead voters and
out-of-state votes. Multiple states experienced issues with IDs and
signature verification. For example, there were known issues in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia with signature verification. According to Engelbrecht, “Inaccurate
voter rolls are the gateway. In GA, 75k+ (in Nov) and 46k+ (in Jan)
votes came from ineligible records, primarily voters who were no longer
living in [the] state, but still found a way to cast a ballot.” The
claim that absentee and mail-in ballots are “verified by the signature
and tracked closely” and “safeguards against anyone who tries to
illegally cast extra ballots” is provably absurd.
AP Claims No Massive Ballot Collection Scheme
During the documentary, Engelbrecht describes an operation that
delivers the ballots in the method of a thousand small cuts. She
explained the operation seems to have been designed to have many mules
delivering small numbers of ballots to avoid surges in ballot drops.
Only in one case does the chain of custody documents indicate a
significant surge at a dropbox, and that was in Gwinnett County, where
1,962 ballots were cast with “comparatively few cell phone devices were proximate to the dropbox during the period of time” notated. In this way, massive numbers of ballots were allegedly delivered, evading detection over time.
The numbers are stunning when the minimum criteria of 10 drop boxes,
with 5 visits and a handful of ballots delivered per visit, are
considered. By that calculus, it is a potential 380,000 illegal votes.
When those criteria are lowered to fewer dropboxes and visits, another
810,000 illegal votes. In Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, the mules
allegedly cast more than enough illegal votes to overcome the margin of
defeat for Trump.
Potential Illegal Votes/2000Mules
Either way, TTV did not set out to litigate or change the election
results. The investigation was data-driven and conservatively designed
to capture evidence that sought to eliminate bias and satisfy a
stringent scientific inquiry standard.
D’Souza asks toward the end of the documentary whether Engelbrecht
and Phillips believe their data proves crimes occurred. He also asks
whether the 2020 election results may have changed as a result of the
ballot trafficking scheme. Phillips responds:
“With the lower bar of five dropbox
visits and just three illegal ballots per drop, we find election fraud
on an astonishing scale in Wisconsin, 83,565 illegal votes were
trafficked in Wisconsin, in Georgia 92,670. In Pennsylvania, 209,505. In
Michigan, 226,590, and Arizona, 207,435. Using this calculus, Trump
would have won all the key States and the final electoral vote 305 to
233.”
Phillips/final
“And so these are the kind of things,
4,000,000 minutes of this, this was an organized effort to subvert a
free and fair election,” continued Phillips. “This is organized
crime. You can’t look at this data in its aggregate and believe
anything otherwise. That’s especially true when you consider that in
places like Georgia, it was only decided by 10,012 thousand votes. And
you look at 5,000 visits just from our mules. It’s not a leap to say
‘yes, this would have changed the results.'”
2000 Mules made its virtual debut on Saturday, May 7, with 80,000 people tuned in, according to D’Souza.
You need to get 500 tons of supplies from Fairbanks, Alaska to the
Arctic Ocean—a journey of about 400 miles through pure wilderness. There
are no roads, very few airstrips, and endless ice. You're going to have
to withstand minus 68 degree temperatures. Also, nuclear armageddon is
on the menu if you're not quick about it.
You, my friend, need a LeTourneau land train.
The DEW Line
By 1954, with the Cold War well underway, the U.S. government realized
the quickest way to get a nuclear bomber from Russia to America was to
go right over the Arctic Circle. If we wanted any chance of preventing a
nuclear apocalypse, we needed to know if Soviet bombers were crossing
the North Pole as soon as possible. The Army planned to build 63 manned
radar stations in the high Arctic around the 69th parallel (200 miles
north of the Arctic circle) as a result. And to transport all the
necessary material that far north, it would have to get creative.
The DEW Line, Wikimedia
Working together, Canadian and American governments determined they
would need about 500 tons of materials to construct all of these
outposts. With no suitable runways or ports and heavy lift helicopters
still in their infancy, it would all have to be hauled in over land. The
task of figuring out how exactly to get that done fell to the same
company that had been chosen to build the stations themselves—The
Western Electric Company, a subsidiary of AT&T.
Solving unsolvable logistics issues wasn't exactly its forte. But with
the help of TRADCOM (U.S. Army Transportation Research and Development
Command), it found the one company—more accurately, the one man—that
might be able to help.
That's R. G. LeTourneau To You
Born in 1888, Robert Gilmore LeTourneau was an inventor of heavy
machinery. In WWII, 70 percent of the Allies' earthmoving equipment was
created by LeTourneau Technologies, Inc. Having very little formal
education, LeTourneau began his working career as an ironmonger. By the
time he died in 1969 he was tremendously wealthy and personally held
nearly 300 patents. He is buried on the campus of the University he
founded in his name, where his gravestone reads "MOVER OF MEN AND
MOUNTAINS." Just a little character development for you.
The hub motor system, LeTourneau Technologies Inc.
LeTourneau had spent the early 1950s perfecting a sort of
diesel-electric drivetrain for multi-wheeled heavy-machinery. The
system—somewhat similar in concept to the sort used on many
locomotives—used a combustion engine to spin an electric generator. This
generator would send its power to hub motors mounted to each wheel of
the vehicle, allowing for multi-wheel-drive without differentials,
driveshafts, or the drivetrain losses associated with them.
This powertrain setup will sound familiar to anyone who read our story
on the doomed Antarctic Snow Cruiser in 2020.
But LeTourneau's design was clearly a generation ahead of Thomas
Poulter's hub motors, which weren't geared properly to handle anything
beyond a gentle incline.
The VC-12 Tournatrain
LeTourneau originally applied this technology to scrapers and graders,
but realizing the scalability of such a system, he soon moved beyond
just earthmoving. In 1953, he dreamed up the first trackless land train
to assist logging operations, the VC-12—a four-wheeled control cab with a
500-horsepower Cummins diesel connected to a generator, pulling three
cargo trailers on giant, rugged tires, all of which were powered by hub
motors to make it a true 16-wheel-drive vehicle. It was brutally ugly,
but critically, it worked.
Developed to haul lumber out of forests over rough terrain, the VC-12
had a hauling capacity of 140 tons. A second version saw LeTourneau add
three more cargo trailers and another control cab out back with a second
Cummins diesel, much like a real train would be set up with multiple
locomotives. TRADCOM caught wind of the project and asked for a
demonstration.
TRADCOM came away impressed. This would be the vehicle to help
engineers build up the DEW Line, or at least a version of it. The
government decided to pay for the construction of a prototype control
cabin built by LeTourneau and designed specifically for Arctic
conditions. The result? The TC-264 Sno-Buggy—and, incidentally, monster
trucks.
Entering the Arctic With a Giant Machine
The Sno-Buggy had a single, 28-liter Allison V-1710 V12, the same
engine used in many American fighter aircraft during WWII including
Lockheed's P-38 Lightning. In this application, it ran on butane and
powered a generator, which in turn sent the juice to four hub motors,
each spinning two massive 10-foot-diameter wheels. There was no
suspension system; any cushioning was provided by the low-pressure tires
instead.
LeTourneau Earthmovers by Eric C. Orlemann
Speaking of those huge wheels, four of them eventually made their way
to the iconic Bigfoot monster truck (Bigfoot IV and V, to be exact) in
the 1980s after owner Bob Chandler bought them from a Seattle-area
junkyard for $1,000.
The Sno-buggy had an exceptionally large contact area on the ground,
which allowed it to spread its weight over the soft snow and ice. As a
result it excelled when tested in Greenland in 1954, and both the U.S.
Army and Alaska Freightlines (the Seattle-based company Western Electric
contracted to transport their freight north) were impressed enough to
order a pair of overland trains. Alaska Freightlines' rig was the first
to be completed, dubbed the VC-22 Sno-Freighter.
Two Trains to Send North
The
VC-22
was quickly assembled in a little more than a month. This is impressive
considering it was one of the longest (if not the longest) off-road
vehicle ever built at the time, with its six cars (including the
locomotive) measuring a total of 274 feet. Each car had four driven
wheels, resulting in 24-wheel-drive courtesy of two 400 horsepower
Cummins diesel engines and the now-familiar hub motor setup. It had a
payload capacity of 150 tons.
Thanks to its 7.3-foot-tall wheels and tires, it could traverse nearly
any terrain. It had a very successful first season hauling freight to
the DEW Line, but a year later it jackknifed and a fire started in the
engine room that rendered it inoperable. Soon after, Alaska
Freightlines' contract with Western Electric ended and the VC-22 was
hauled out of Canada and left on the side of a highway in central
Alaska, where it remains to this day.
Sometime after the VC-22 was completed, the Army's more complex
machine was also finished. Donning the same 10-foot wheels as the
Sno-Buggy that impressed officials, the so-called LCC-1 had four cars
including an articulating locomotive at the front. Its 600-hp diesel
engine sent power to all sixteen wheels, and it was capable of hauling
45 tons.
This machine led a much longer and more successful life than the
VC-22. Dispatched to Greenland, it hauled cargo all over the region from
1956-1962. But it too was eventually abandoned in an Alaska salvage
yard before being rescued and put on display at the Yukon Transportation
Museum in Whitehorse, Canada,
where it's also visible from space on Google Maps.
It might not sound like it, but the Army was very impressed with the
LCC-1's capabilities. So in 1958, officials commissioned the
construction of its successor, the longest off-road vehicle ever and
LeTourneau's final triumph: the TC-497 Overland Train Mark II.
LeTourneau's Gas Turbine Land Train
U.S. Army
The TC-497 is a truly remarkable feat of engineering. Capable of
hauling 150 tons at 20 mph for nearly 400 miles (this range could be
extended by carrying extra fuel cars), it was powered by four 1,170-hp
gas turbine engines. Only one of these engines was in the locomotive,
with the other three were housed in their own separate cars. It
retained the hub motor system from previous overland trains as well,
meaning all 54 wheels on the vehicle were powered.
But unlike on LeTourneau's other land trains, the trailers were also
steerable, so the turning radius (which was formerly something like a
quarter mile) was now much tighter, as seen in the image above.
The locomotive itself was massive at over 30 feet tall, but its size
belied the fact that the smaller gas turbine engines allowed LeTourneau
to add living quarters as well. The inside of the locomotive could sleep
six and had a complete galley and bathroom. The train's total length?
570 feet—nearly two football fields. And due to the train's modular
construction, the max length was theoretically infinite. As many power
cars as were necessary could be added, along with the fuel to keep them
running.
The TC-497 was tested by the Army in 1962 at the Yuma Proving Grounds
in Arizona. The results were once again impressive—but so were
simultaneous advances in heavy-lift helicopters like the Sikorsky CH-54
Tarhe, a fleet of which could accomplish what the TC-497 promised with a
fraction of the time and effort. The time of solving a problem like
remote logistics with a massive, almost cartoonish machine like an
overland train was over.
In the end, the
TC-497
was also abandoned. It sat intact in Arizona for almost a decade before
its trailers were scrapped; today only the cab survives, still baking
in the desert sun and collecting dust. An unfitting end to one of the
largest land vehicles ever made.
10 HUGE quotes from the SCOTUS draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade
May 3rd, 2022 8:14 am
It would appear that we woke up to a new world today.
Here are 10 of the hardest-hitting excerpts from Justice Alito's draft opinion that would eviscerate and overturn Roe v. Wade:
"We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled.
The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is
implicitly protected by any constitutional provision...."
"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.
Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging
consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the
abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and
deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the
issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives."
"In the years prior to [Roe v. Wade], about a third of the States had liberalized their laws, but Roe abruptly ended that political process.
It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire Nation, and
it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single State. …
[I]t represented the ‘exercise of raw judicial power'… and it sparked a
national controversy that has embittered our political culture for a
half-century."
"The inescapable conclusion
is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation's
history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of
prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the
earliest days of the common law until 1973."
"In some States, voters may believe that the abortion right should be more even more [sic] extensive than the right Casey and Roe
recognized. Voters in other States may wish to impose tight
restrictions based on their belief that abortion destroys an ‘unborn
human being.' ... Our nation's historical understanding of ordered
liberty does not prevent the people's elected representatives from
deciding how abortion should be regulated."
"We have long recognized, however, that stare decisis is ‘not an inexorable command,'
and it ‘is at its weakest when we interpret the Constitution.' It has
been said that it is sometimes more important that an issue ‘be settled
than that it be settled right.' But when it comes to the interpretation
of the Constitution — the ‘great charter of our liberties,' which was
meant ‘to endure through a long lapse of ages,' we place a high value on
having the matter ‘settled right.'"
"On many other occasions, this Court has overruled important constitutional decisions.
… Without these decisions, American constitutional law as we know it
would be unrecognizable, and this would be a different country."
"Casey described itself as calling both sides of the national controversy to resolve their debate, but in doing so, Casey necessarily
declared a winning side. … The Court short-circuited the democratic
process by closing it to the large number of Americans who dissented in
any respect from Roe. … Together, Roe and Casey represent an error that cannot be allowed to stand."
"Roe certainly did not succeed in ending division on the issue of abortion. On the contrary, Roe
‘inflamed' a national issue that has remained bitterly divisive for the
past half-century....This Court's inability to end debate on the issue
should not have been surprising. This Court cannot bring about the
permanent resolution of a rancorous national controversy simply by
dictating a settlement and telling the people to move on. Whatever
influence the Court may have on public attitudes must stem from the
strength of our opinions, not an attempt to exercise ‘raw judicial power.'"
"We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today's decision overruling Roe and Casey. And
even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority
to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job,
which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly. We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives."
Whoever
leaked this draft did so to intimidate the justices in order to stop
the ruling from going through and/or to pressure the radical Dems to
nuke the filibuster and pack the court.
Absolutely shameful behavior from people who hate our country.
Pray
that Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett will
have the courage to withstand the coming storm and see the job through.
Also pray for their safety, and the safety of their families.
