On Not Being A Dove

A long but fascinating essay from the late John Updike. I found this passage quite interesting:

The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of [the president] by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property—the USA and its many amenities—intact. A common report in this riotous era was of slum-dwellers throwing rocks and bottles at the firemen come to put out fires; the peace marchers, the upper-middle-class housewives pushing baby carriages along in candlelit processions, seemed to me to be behaving identically, without the excuse of being slum-dwellers.

Emphasis mine.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. They weren’t anti-war — they were just on the other side.

Sniffle

Yeah, blogging’s light. I’m busy with the work I’m doing out in LA, plus I’m coming down with a cold, which often happens when I travel. As long as I hermit up at home I can go months without getting sick, but exposure to all of the exotic bugs in airplanes and with new people tends to get to me.

Delta Launch Tonight

A Delta II, out of Vandenberg, with a new weather satellite, with a ten-minute window starting at 2:22 AM Pacific. The place I’m staying has a good view from the roof patio, but I’m afraid that the Pacific storm moving in tonight and tomorrow will obscure it. On the other hand, it may also delay it. If they don’t get out tonight, though, I’d guess they’ll have to scrub until after the second front moves through on Saturday.

A Hundred Million Here…

…a hundred million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real job losses.

Nancy Pelosi: “Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs.”

At that rate, we’ll all be out of work before the end of the month, with hundreds of millions of fantasy Americans to go.

Whenever the Speaker opens her mouth, I have this sense that she is saying only what she imagines will be politically effective to the dolts who continue to elect her and her fellow partisans, and that she is either unaware of, or completely indifferent to the fact that any relationship between what she says and objective reality is purely coincidental. In short, the woman is a hyperpolitical idiot.

[Via Mark Hemingway]

Just Words?

Keith Cowing notes that President Obama read to schoolkids about the moon landings.

It would be nice to think that this is a harbinger for his space policy, but I would note that he’s been in office for two weeks now, and despite all the rumors prior to the inauguration, NASA continues to operate on an acting administrator. Of course, it would actually be unusual for an administration to name a NASA administrator so early. This is because it’s hard to find a candidate who is both capable and willing to do the job. The other reason is that space isn’t important…

Reefer Madness

Andrew Stuttaford:

I don’t blame Michael Phelps for apologizing. He has a living to earn, so he did what he had to do.

In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man’s failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone’s health—and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.

At any rate, now we know the real story of why he ate 10,000 calories a day…

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!