Astronaut arrested in alleged kidnap attempt

> How else could this “Astro-Nut” have been able to pass
> muster? Presumably, candidates are subjected to
> psychological tests to determine their fitness. Were
> there no signs of problems when she was evaluated?"

All good questions which one hopes will be investigated and be made public in the fullness of time.

It's a little bit tangential, but I once got to know someone who had been a submariner -- a not dissimilar occupation (except that the view is worse). The psych tests are extremely thorough because nuclear weapons are involved. The navy gets its pick of the very few from thousands of applicants because the pay and prestige are high, the food and general service conditions are extra-good, and they get lots of time off between stints on duty (missions are typically about 60 days if I recall correctly and they get a comparable amount of time off inbetween).

Anyway, you could tell within 30 seconds of casual conversation that this guy was very different from the rest of us -- an extra-gentle soul with absolutely no streak of confrontation or strong feelings in him, the perfectly level head and anti-warrior. This struck me long before I knew what his occupation had been. I'd never given submarining any thought before, but it instantly made sense given the job requirements, and I've never forgotten it.

In spite of all we hear about women being bludgeoned by patriarchal society into being subservient, meek, and all the rest, it's hard to imagine being able to find X dozen women who could do what these guys do (and have done, and are doing as we speak) without serious incident to the extent we forget they even exist.

* MB

P.S. - the news was just running an interview clip of Nowak in her astronaut suit before her mission last year... she was talking about loving roller-coasters and "the thrill of the ride", which should have been a clue.

I would have asked for hazzard pay if I was the police officer required to change her diaper after the arrest. I also wonder if the soiled diaper will be submitted as evidence during the court trial. Sometimes you just "gotta" laugh a bit when reading some of these stories.

anthony

If women can kill children like Andrea Yates in Texas and others recently did and get away with it by claiming as a defense Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity then it should be a cinch for this woman to claim the same. By doing that she will be out in a couple of years when she is "cured" and not have a criminal record to boot! I mean it was a cat fight over some damn man after all.

We already know the justice system is not taking her too seriously. They posted bail at $10,000. Imagine a man's bail (if he did get bail) if he did the things she did.

Headline: "Psycho Female Astronaut Tries to Kill Love Rival with Pepper Spray and BB-Gun!"

What? (Errr... whuh, wuh.... whaaat?)

After all that high-tech training she tries to snuff her secret boyfriend’s girlfriend with these dimestore toys? While wearing diapers so she doesn’t need to make a pit stop during a 600-mile drive?

She’s a freakin’ astronaut! And she cannot calculate velocity, duration, distance per liter of urine excreted, or target docking?

My tax dollars have been wasted if she cannot execute a simple earthbound mission like capping her female rival!

But for this lucky media soap opera, she might have been our first woman on Mars!

This is either silly or scary…. I can’t decide …. yet.

But I know I’ll be writing the screenplay for Alien Mom-Meets-Fatal Attraction-In-Space!

And this women represents the very best of NASA’s astrovaginauts?

Sad, sad, sad.

Frightening beyond belief.

On so many levels….

The "space theme" in this media scandal is just so rich with potential comedy!

As a kid who watched the 1st generation Star Trek series and was fascinated with all the weird female aliens that were paraded out every week ... (Madonna got her bras from them...) ---

Consider: Trying to make a trip to Mars with any feminist on board is a guaranteed disaster.

Even a simple Moon Colony will be eradicated within a few years of co-habiting male/female astronauts?

Why?

Ask the Israeli army...

That's a clue... and all I have to say.

CBS Evening News said bail was $25,500.

I think there are some other former astronauts who have come back down to earth pretty hard, but this case sets the bar at a new level.

* MB

This is just a technicality, but assuming the stupid bitch had to stop for gas a couple times on her way to Florida, why couldn't she just schedule her pisses accordingly, instead of wearing an adult diaper? It must not have occurred to her how suspicious it would look if the diaper started to leak.

I thought the TV said the bail was $15,500, but either way it is ridiculously low. Imagine how much higher the amount would be, if a MAN had come seeking to destroy a male competitor for a woman's affections. Also compare this to the 400 Grand each in the Duke rape hoax.

-axo
PS: aside on submarines: I was on a Fast Attack for four years. It is smaller than a missile boat ("Boomer"), which is the kind your friend was on. I don't know about officers, but the enlisted of the crews are not tested psychologically per say..at least not in the early 80's (my period of duty). Instead, there is effectively a weeding out process consisting of "schools" where one learns the trade he will use, hazing, mind control, sleep deprivation and incredible amount of chicken-shit.
Fast attacks suck big time. The schedule is irregular and sometimes you go out on very short notice. You might be gone a few days or a few months. There is only one crew - unlike the two on boomers, who rotate deployments. Also the guys on boomers get extra pay for quarters (rent/mortgage), where as this benefit does not exist for Fast Attackers, who are extreme prostitutes
.
Also there is no way you can have women with men on a sub..maybe an all-woman crew is okay. Everytime I tell someone that, they say, "Oh, is that so? That's what they said about Army combat units, and about surface ships..that we couldn't have men alongside women..so you are wrong". And I respond by saying, "what fucking planet do you live on??? Yes we now have women in combat, so we have ended up with lowered standards for fitness for duty, male soldiers taking up the slack for female, and Jessica Lynch..and on ships, we have 40% of female crew members who "happen" to get pregnant just prior to deployment (some of whom self-abort the fetuses later); lowered moral, Tailhook, and I knew of a woman on a sub tender (a kind of ship) who would enjoy undressing down to her underwear during drills. Gee, isn't it good to know we have professionals such as this in the Navy? It is YOU who are wrong, stupid - get a brain."

The convoluted egghead mentality (that of an "expert" on the issue, who has never served), is something like, "well, we don't read about a whole lot of military screw-ups in the paper..at least I haven't heard of that many other than say Tailhook; and we don't seem to have lost any wars due to women in combat..so as far as I'm concerned, everything is fine and dandy!".

-axo

"all the weird female aliens that were paraded out every week ... (Madonna got her bras from them...) "

ha ha hee hee!! I thought she got the metalic bras from a junk yard (oil change funnels), or maybe from Disney (the Tin Man's hat). Oh well, I guess Madonna was at the forefront of furthering women's causes, always empowering herself and breaking glass ceilings.."you go girl"! What a role model!!

-axo

The good news is that police and prosecutors are taking her seriously, just as if this were done by a man. The bad news is that they are going completely ape shit crazy with the charges, just like they would with a man. Assault, definitely, attempted kidnapping, maybe, attempted murder, no way in hell. There is no way that spraying someone with pepper spray is an attempt to take their life. This woman needs to go to jail for a while, but the prosecutor should also be charged with misconduct for making ridiculous charges, much like the idiots in Boston who flipped out over some Lite Brites.

The news articles mention that she is married with three (3) kids. What does her husband think of her antics? Note that Nowak considers it appropriate adult behavior to drive 900 miles to remove a rival for her stud-on-the-side's affection (and a legitimate rival as both her victim and stud are single).
I hope that her husband has the sense to immediately divorce her (like LeTorneau's ex) before she can pull a Clara Harris and divorce him and bring the kids into this kind of environment.

Apparently she is facing attempted murder charges because in the trunk of her car police found a bunch of trash bags, a new metal mallet, a large knife, and of course, the BB gun. This looks very much like she intended to kidnap, kill, then dismember the other woman. Sounds like attempted murder to me.

Watch here. At the end of the report, the reporter talks about how her recent spaceflight may have left her susceptible to stress, let-down, etc., and she may have been reacting this way to it. Doubt this kind of commentary would be getting used if all the sexes here were reversed.

Dunno but there's a good chance that there'll be a temp. insanity plea or maybe even just an assault plea, with probation and psychological counselling. Add the "woman space hero" factor and the odds get real good, better than 50/50. Gotta just wait 'n see!

The media campaign to make her into a victim has already begun. According to news reports, she is back in Texas. The spin is that she's separated from her husband in part due to the stress of her career.

If there was no attempt to murder (i.e. taking a shot at someone) then you can't charge someone with attempted murder. The best they could do is conspiracy to commit murder, but event that looks pretty weak at this point. The real reason they brought this charge is so they could keep her in jail w/o bond.

In addition to the items listed below, she also had rubber tubing in the trunk. Early Tuesday, the judge said she could be freed on $15,500 bail if she stayed away from the other woman and wore a monitoring device. But the judge increased that amount to $25,500 after prosecutors filed attempted murder charges.

Apparently she is already being coddled. Former astronauts Steve Lindsey and Chris Ferguson have as their "primary concern her health and well-being and that she get through this". The both have attended at least one of her hearings.

If the accused was a man, do you think the judge would allow his "supporters" to attend the initial hearing? Maybe so, but what man or woman would claim to be a friend of the accused in that case anyway?? They would have already dumped him (unless they were an MRA).

-axo

From the Appendix to "The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage", by Dr. Almroth Wright (1913):

For man the physiological psychology of woman is full of difficulties.

He is not a little mystified when he encounters in her periodically recurring phases of hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss of the sense of proportion.

He is frankly perplexed when confronted with a complete alteration of character in a woman who is child-bearing.

When he is a witness of the "tendency of woman to morally warp when nervously ill," and of the terrible physical havoc which the pangs of a disappointed love may work, he is appalled.

And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling when he sees serious and long-continued mental disorders developing in connexion with the approaching extinction of a woman's reproductive faculty.

No man can close his eyes to these things; but he does not feel at liberty to speak of them.

As for woman herself, she makes very light of any of these mental upsettings.

She perhaps smiles a little at them. . . .

None the less, these upsettings of her mental equilibrium are the things that a woman has most cause to fear; and no doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies.

It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist [feminist]. He cannot shut them to the fact that there is mixed up with the woman's movement much mental disorder; and he cannot conceal from himself the physiological emergencies which lie behind...

* MB

Here's one theory:

She was going to disable the victim with the pepper spray, then knock her unconscious with the mallet. Then use the tubing to tie a plastic bag over her head/upper body, letting her suffocate slowly depending on the size of the bag. Why wouldn't Nowak simply strangle the victim with the tubing and forget about the bag? Because she thought she might not be strong enough to do that, and besides the tubing may stretch making it even more difficult.
The beebee gun? Not sure, but here's 3 possibilities:
1) To help with initial debilitation of the the victim if necessary.
2) Use it to take the victim hostage, especially if the victim thinks the gun is real, not beebee.
2) To inflict additional torture later, while the victim is incapacitated.

-axo

P.S: for some reason, whenever I think about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, I also recall Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, who was also named Watson. Here's a bit of trivia: many people are familiar with the legend, that the first words ever uttered over a telephone were when Bell "phoned" his assistant and said, "Watson, come here..I need you!". However, very few people know what the response was that Bell received: "The number you have dialed has been disconnected, or is no longer in service!"