General

Being Thankful

I’ve got family visiting, and am making my traditional stuffing with cornbread, turkey sausage (I used to be able to get cranberry sausage in California, but there are no Bristol Farms here), wild rice, pine nuts, wild mushrooms, and the secret ingredient, pomegranate. My niece helped me dissect it for the berries. Her mother is from Iraq, so she knows her pomegranates.

We’ll be busy the rest of the day cooking, taking kids to the beach, watching football, ingesting fermented malt beverages, etc.

I’m thankful that we have pomegranates. And turkeys. I’m thankful that at my age, I’ve still got enough teeth to enjoy them (I recall my grandfather having to cut off his corn with a knife to eat it, when he wasn’t a lot older than me). I’m thankful for medical technology in general, which seems to be continuing to get better, and giving me hope that I’ll live to see escape velocity.

I’m thankful for family and loved ones, and the ability to share my thanks with them in good health on this day.

I’m thankful for the technology that allows me to express my thankfulness to those people who read this little web site, and I’m thankful for the readers who unaccountably and seemingly masochistically keep coming back to read it.

I’m very thankful that we’ll have elections again in two years. And that’s not a partisan comment (particularly since I’m not a member of any political party)–it would be true regardless of the results three weeks ago. Having a sister-in-law who is from Baghdad can make you appreciate small things like that.

War Commentary

We Don’t Need A “Dialogue”

Victor Davis Hanson says that we’re still in the “phony war” stage:

…why would either Damascus or Teheran wish to talk? The answer is plain. The former wants to profess to cool it a bit in destabilizing Iraq in exchange for us turning a blind eye in Lebanon; the latter wants to act like stopping the sending of agents of our destruction into Iraq in exchange for cooling our rhetoric about their bomb. What we would be doing in essence by

War Commentary

We Don’t Need A “Dialogue”

Victor Davis Hanson says that we’re still in the “phony war” stage:

…why would either Damascus or Teheran wish to talk? The answer is plain. The former wants to profess to cool it a bit in destabilizing Iraq in exchange for us turning a blind eye in Lebanon; the latter wants to act like stopping the sending of agents of our destruction into Iraq in exchange for cooling our rhetoric about their bomb. What we would be doing in essence by

War Commentary

We Don’t Need A “Dialogue”

Victor Davis Hanson says that we’re still in the “phony war” stage:

…why would either Damascus or Teheran wish to talk? The answer is plain. The former wants to profess to cool it a bit in destabilizing Iraq in exchange for us turning a blind eye in Lebanon; the latter wants to act like stopping the sending of agents of our destruction into Iraq in exchange for cooling our rhetoric about their bomb. What we would be doing in essence by

Space

Encouragement

Jon Goff is unaccountably questioning the value of his blogging. I haven’t been linking to him as much as I should, but he has been putting up a lot of well-thought-out and thought -provoking posts on potential space architectures that would be far superior to NASA’s current plans. Head over there and tell him to keep it up.

I do second the recommendation to get off Blogspot, though. If nothing else, it would allow him to post his URL in comments here.

War Commentary

Off The Rails

Jonah Goldberg thinks that Battlestar Galactica’s writers have fallen into the “why do they hate us” trap, in a completely absurd way (and one that continues to mislead the public about the nature of our real-life enemy):

Adama concludes it’s all his fault because he led the mission that proved the human race really were “war mongers” in the eyes of the Cylons.

I don’t want to use a lot of philosophical or literary lingo here, but this is really stooooooopid. Let’s say I’ve been feuding with my neighbor a lot. We’ve called a draw and built a tall fence to avoid each other. But I don’t trust him and I think he may be up to something. So, I peek over the fence. Maybe I even climb over it and look around his back yard for a minute. When my neighbor sees this his immediate response is to get a hatchet and slaughters my entire family, including my relatives in other homes far away. Clearly: It’s all my fault!

What is so depressing about this is that Ronald Moore and the other creators of BSG seem to think that “instigating” a conflict in any way assigns the moral responsibility to the instigator. If I step on a psychopath’s toe, it’s my fault when he buries a ballpoint pen in my forehead. Or, to be fair, they think this is a reasonable, morally serious view. And since they believe it’s their job to illuminate the issues in the war on terror, it cannot be denied that they think this is a serious position in the debate over that conflict.

Again: This is really stooooooopid. The idea that the human race had it coming from the Cylons is moral flapdoodle (and flatly unbelievable; the creators seem to think decent humans would be deeply conflicted about declaring total war on a bunch of artificial lifeforms who slaughtered 99% of humanity).

Space

Step Backwards

Clark Lindsey notes that the FAA-AST web site has been revamped, by folding it into the general FAA web site. While the improvements he notes are worthwhile (though the changing of permalinks definitely is not), I’m unthrilled with the concept of entwining AST even more deeply with the FAA. AST was originally the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, reporting directly to the Secretary of Transportation. The Clinton administration demoted it, and folded it into FAA in the early nineties.

This had two deleterious effects. First, it gave it less clout within the department, since the AA for it now had to report to the SecTran up through the FAA administrator. Second, it placed it in an agency that, after the Valujet crash, had its responsibility declared solely for public safety, with none to promote the aviation industry (one of its charters in the early days).

But the infant space transportation industry needs a different balance between safety and promotion than a mature aviation industry, and there is a potential clash of regulatory cultures as long as AST remains within FAA. Its current bureaucratic abode makes it much easier to justify nannyism that could strangle it in the cradle. I think that there should be a push on by the space activist community to restore it to its original position as a separate administration within DOT, and I’m not happy whenever I see its status as a subset of FAA further entrenched.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!