Impossible Scissors

I'm coming to the realization that I'm not getting a free ride through grad school. So I've had to rewrite my life plan. Now I think I'll leave active duty at the earliest possible date, then put in sixteen years as a public affairs officer in the reserves. Then I will continue my education, pursuing a masters or even a Ph. D. in history. I want to write books for a living. Engineering is really wearing me out.

Colin Powell finally speaks out.

Curiously, there is no mention of how Powell vetoed Bush plans to get UN resolutions on Iraq's human rights record or support for terrorism. It's nice to see the media asking our leaders the tough questions (sarcasm.)

James Oberg has a stirring tribute to Robert Lawrence, who was supposed to be America's first black astronaut.

I first heard of Robert Lawrence when his name was added to the astronaut memorial wall in 1997 or so. Lawrence had died in a jet crash before flying in space, like so many other astronauts before him: Elliot See, Charles Bassett, and C. C. Williams, to name a few. At the time I was of the belief that the wall should be reserved for people who were killed during spaceflight or in preparation for spaceflight. (By the same logic that was used to add See, Lawrence, and others to the wall, the name of Jack McKay should be added as well. He contracted cancer from breathing in rocket fuel vapors after a crash-landing of the X-15 spaceplane.)

The question here is the heart of James Oberg's piece: what makes a person an astronaut? Do you have to go beyond the 50 mile mark, as per Air Force regulations? Is it the 62 mile mark, internationally accepted as the boundary of space? Or do you merely have to wear the blue suit?

Robert Lawrence didn't do any of these, but he surely possessed "The Right Stuff." In Tom Wolfe's book of the same name, he talks briefly about Lawrence and gives you the impression that he wasn't of the same calibre as the other MOL astronauts, and was merely added to the program as a token of diversity. James Oberg at least takes this notion and blows it out of the sky.

Keith Rosenkrantz, an F-16 pilot from Operation Desert Storm, was our university's guest of honor last night. He was pretty informative, and made some provocative predictions like the demise of US Airways.

We approach the anniversary of his last F-16 flight: February 27, 1991. He was part of the "Highway of Death," and he felt very remorseful about it. I can't say I agree with him, although he was a participant and I will let him feel however he chooses. From my persective, the retreating Iraqis were still armed and would live to fight another day. On their way from Kuwait, they had set the oil wells ablaze and stolen everything that wasn't nailed down. Picking them off as they fled like rats contributed to the degradation of Iraq's army in the period after the war. If only we had cut off the Republican Guard, or helped the Shiite and Kurdish rebels in spring 1991...

Yes, today is the reason for yesterday's holiday: George Washington's birthday.

I have been torn on the question of who was our greatest president: Washington or Lincoln. In Washington's favor, he was the father of his country, he led the colonial army, put down the post-revolution rebellions, and established just about every precedent for the presidency at a time when he could have been king. Abe Lincoln, on the other hand, held the nation together in its hour of need and made the bold decision to fight for unity when weaker men would have backed down. Abe's leadership led to the abolition of slavery and laid the framework for a truly united country, the United States of America.

Rather than having a single day, President's Day, to honor all of the presidents, we need separate holidays for George Washinton's birthday and Abe Lincoln's birthday. Maybe that will help us better reflect on how great these two men were and how we can follow their examples to be better leaders and better citizens.

I worked the Daytona 500 today for the second straight year. This time I was ushering. I gained a new appreciation for the 8 hours per day that Donald Rumsfeld spends on his feet, as I worked from 5:15 AM to 6:15 PM, after getting only three hours of sleep and consuming only a can of Diet Mountain Dew.

Comparisons with the Super Bowl were inevitable. I felt the 500 was far more organized, although there was much more spectacle involved with the Super Bowl. The flyover was a "mundane" flight of four F-15's from Tyndall Air Force Base. The pre-race entertainment consisted of Clint Black, Brian Wilson (yes, THE Brian Wilson!,) and Five for Fighting. We got to hear Vanessa Williams rehearsing the national anthem early in the morning. Her performance that afternoon was spot-on. She is an extremely talented singer, and just as good live as on an album. She puts crack-whores like Britney Spears to shame in the talent department.

I didn't get to see much of the race, although I can't say I find NASCAR terribly interesting. I did see the crash near the end of the race (with about 15 laps to go) where a car with a crunched left fender went skidding across the grass near pit row, reeking of burning rubber. If most NASCAR fans watch the races to experience the schadenfreude of witnessing a crash, this race did not disappoint. It was the most violent Daytona 500 since I've been living here.

I also got ripped off by two bucks while buying already-overpriced merchandise for friends back home. I think I made up for that by loading up on free "Take Five" candy bars from the Hershey's representtives.

The Simpsons tried creating a buzz last summer by announcing that one of its characters would be coming out of the closet in 2005. With Waylon Smithers (the most obvious choice) being ruled out, fans specuated on who that character would be. I thought it would be Moe, Lenny, Carl, or even Gil (the crappy replacement for Lionel Hutz when Phil Hartman was murdered.)

The episode aired tonight, and while I was somewhat surprised by the character who eventually did come out, I thought their choice of character was reasonable and consistent with the series' continuity.

The episode itself (and its handling of same-sex marriage) was a ham-handed affair, though there were occasional sparks of brilliant satire. The buildup to Springfield's adoption of same-sex marriage was rushed, and based on the ludicrous idea that same-sex marriage will somehow bring significant revenues to the town. After Rev. Lovejoy refuses to perform the ceremonies, Homer becomes a corrupt minister who marries same-sex couples for money. Homer's previous dealings with homosexual issues (like the classic "Homer's Phobia" episode, and a later episode where he shares an apartment with a gay couple) are disappointingly ignored by the writers of this episode.

I did appreciate the reference to "the slippery slope" by Kent Brockman, after Homer runs out of same-sex couples to wed and starts expanding his marriage business to inanimate objects. After all, if we redefine marriage once to account for same-sex couples, it will be easy to redefine it again to allow for polygamy. Other than that, the episode was pretty vapid (as most of the recent episodes have been.)

Rush Limbaugh is visiting Afghanistan.

No doubt, "El Rushbo's" critics will say that he's using the trip to draw attention to himself. And I'm sure that is one of his motivations. But I think his main purpose, which I totally agree with, is to draw media attention to the military and humanitarian successes we've had during Operation Enduring Freedom.

It's often said that no news is good news. The reverse also happens to be true: good news is no news. Feel-good stories don't sell papers or get people to watch the nightly news. Perhaps that's why we rarely hear anything that comes out of Afghanistan. There are only a few stories that come out of that country anymore: a soldier is killed, warlords fight each other, the Taliban sets a bomb off, or heroin sales are booming.

Afghanistan, though not without setbacks, has been a great triumph for the Bush administration. Using the Soviets and British as a meterstick for progress, we've avoided a quagmire while only keeping 18,000 soldiers (both US and NATO) on the ground. We have improved security to the point that the country had a free and safe election. Despite media silence on the issue, the Taliban remnants are splintering: the least resolute guerrillas are dropping their weapons and returning to the cities, while the most hardcore fighters are forming rival movements.

Afghanistan is still largely living in the stone age, and the US will spend a long time there rebuilding that war-torn land. But with media coverage this bad, will anybody know we've been there?

Read them and weep.

Much thanks to Dave and Sammy for hauling my worthless bum up to Jacksonville to take the test. I really wish that Riddle would offer it.

Tonight I ask all of my beloved readers to keep Tony Snow in their prayers. The talk radio and Fox News host has announced that he has colon cancer.

I think that Tony Snow is my favorite personality on talk radio. He never comes across with the bluster and bravado of Rush Limbaugh. Nor do his opinions sound toolish, partisan, and unchallenged, like those of Sean Hannity. Tony Snow is a man of quiet dignity, whose faith in God and hope for mankind have guided him through life.

When I first got hooked on the Sunday Morning talking head programs in 1999, Tony Snow was the man who ensnared me. His voice always found a way to resonate with me. Needless to say, my viewership of the talking head shows (despite my respect for NBC's Tim Russert) declined after he left "Fox News Sunday" in 2003. I was lucky enough that he continued his work on radio, and WLS 890 would play reruns of his show on the weekends.

Tony's voice has to stay on the airwaves. Even after Tony is done delivering his eloquent addresses, his work will carry on. Perhaps Tony played some early, formative role in encouraging my political expression and shaping my voice. I like to think that his fingerprints have graced the pages of this blog.

I feel like such a jackaninny today. I screwed up big-time on a quiz because I didn't bother to look at the board to find the formulae I needed to solve the problem. I spent about 10 minutes trying to derive the reationship between gamma, Cp, Cv, and R. I know I wasn't the only one who did this, but that won't buy me any more points with Dr. Attia.

This is a very interesting story. Everyone always assumes that Microsoft is a Republican company, because it's monopolistic and oppressive. When my liberal, alcoholic computer-programmer uncle went on his Thanksgiving tirade, he made a point of blasting Bill Gates. The joke must be on him; Gates probably gave wads of cash to Hanoi John during this election cycle.

It also leaves me in a moral quandry. This blog is hosted by Blogspot and edited on Blogger (which are parts of the Google empire.) I've used Google exclusively since late 1998. This computer (begrudgingly) uses Windows XP and Microsoft Office.

So how do I stop contributing to the libs' pockets? I'll have to move this blog off Blogspot eventually, and getting used to Yahoo searches will take some time.

I could always migrate to the Mac. Many people think that the Mac is a liberal computer; they think of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as the ultimate anti-establishment hippies who built a computer in their garage. Yet Rush Limbaugh uses a Mac. Perhaps the lesson here is that ther's no such thing as a liberal computer, and no such thing as a conservative computer either.

Some wise words from Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria. He's certainly no conservative, but he's not an America-hater either. He believes in the desperate need for Arab / Islamic democracy, and he has some witty quips to show for it.

"Whatever you thought of the invasion, to advocate a quick exit from Iraq is neither hawkish nor dovish; it's the foreign policy of an ostrich."

More evidence is pouring in to suggest that the US is conducting aerial reconnaissance over Iran. This comes just weeks after Sy Hersh's report about special ops forces in Iran. All of this activity is enough to scare some lefties into thinking that "Operation Iranian Freedom" is just around the corner, with Evil Halliburton already making preparations to suck Iran dry.

People like Sy Hersh live in a paranoid fantasy where George W. Bush is merely the pawn of the "neoconservative cabal," a reincarnation of the "Great Jewish Conspiracy" feared by the Lyndon LaRouches of the world. Under this delusion, the neocon cabal is waging war against Islam and creating a Zionist paradise in the middle east.

What's really going on is an attempt by the Pentagon to get better intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program. Because of the WMD debacle in Iraq, our approach to Iran has changed. Hopefully we will have learned lessons from that unhappy experience that will improve our odds of success in Iran.

Because of the massive intel breakdown in Iraq (and not just on WMD's, but also things like the decapitation strike against Saddam Hussein that wasn't,) the international community has erected an even higher burden of proof that we will have to meet in order to convince them of nuclear danger from Iran. At this stage, our intel on Iran is even murkier than it was with Iraq.

There are two ways of fixing this unhappy situation: collect your intelligence on your own, or use Iranian proxies to do it for you. Some members of the administration have suggested using the "People's Mujaheddeen," or MEK, for this purpose. After getting burned by Ahmed "Heroes in Error" Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, we should be incredibly wary of defectors and dissdents. This should be doubly true for the MEK, who are a cultlike band of fanatical Marxists.

We must also realize that war is not the answer (and please don't accuse me of being a hippie, because I eat hippies for breakfast. Mmm... hippies...) Limited options like airstrikes will probably not eliminate the nuclear program, and they certainly won't topple the Iranian mullahs (despite what the Perles and Feiths of the world might hope.) A full-scale invasion (advocated by armchair generals like Richard Clarke) will be far more violent and destructive than invading and occupying Iraq. The Iranians will surely rely on suicide attacks, human wave attacks, and chemical weapons to defend the homeland. That is not to say, however, that the Iranians will not be influenced by potential military options. With 138,000 Americans in nearby Iraq and over 15,000 in neighboring Afghanistan, there is a lot we can do to ratchet up the pressure.

Right now we are playing a good hand by being the silent partner to the British-French-German effort to disarm Iran. The Iranians will never compromise with "the Great White Satan," but maybe our more liberal friends in Europe could persuade them.

The odds say that this diplomacy will eventually break down. By that point, we need to convince the UN of the necessity for sanctioning Iran. That's going to require hard intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.

Sanctioning Iran should not be a token effort. These have to be truly draconian efforts, rivaling the suffering inflicted on Iraq's people during the Oil-for-Food fiasco. The sanctions should spread great hardships on Iran's people, with the explicit message that such is the consequence of developing nuclear weapons. The sanctions will take time, but they can hopefully drive a wedge between the people and the mullahs who use them as pawns.

In order for this plan to work, we need excellent intelligence--the same intel-gathering that Sy Hersh and the liberal establishment oppose. At the same time, President Bush and Secretary Rice need to formulate a coherent plan for dealing with Iran, as one does not yet exist to anybody's knowledge. We also need to keep Israel on the sidelines as long as possible and hope they don't spring into action.

The rumor mill is saying that Israeli F-16's scored two more victories in September 2004. I'm surprised that this story, if true, stayed secret for so long.

The Israelis have had great success with the F-15 and F-16. These jets actually saw combat in Israeli hands before they went to war for the US. Between the exceptional engneering and the equally exceptional pilots who fly them, they now have kill records greater than 100-0 and 75-0, respectively.

I like to use the phrase "Jihad Joe doesn't have an air force." That's not totally true, as Syria and Iran (the sponsors of Hezbollah) have proven. Still, they should learn a lesson from the Iraqi air force: bury your jets in the sand while you still have the chance.

I've been burning the midnight oil over the past few days, getting only four to five hours of sleep while working on homework for Turbines & Rockets, Electrical Engineering, and Design II. That's not mentioning the public affairs madness, which has been tempered by my generally-awesome staff.

Design II came back to haunt me last night and today. Dave and I stayed up until about 3:30 AM working on the report and presentataion. I got about 4.5 hours of sleep and went right back at it by 9 AM. The team worked all the way up to the buzzer at 3:30 PM. Despite the mad rush, the team worked in a coordinated and intense manner to get the project done. I was so hurried that I had to read my slides while I was on the shitter just before class started.

Our presentation wasn't as slick as that of the other groups, and we never put enough effort into the cost estimate (until my mad dashing on Thursday to interview professors.) I think it showed during the presentation, although we weren't the biggest bunch of schmucks presenting by a long shot. Stil, the presentation was only worth a third of what the paper was worth, and I think the paper turned out pretty good in the end (even without Santella's explanation of how I did the iteratve solution for the internal ballistics of the hybrid rocket.)

Dave and I "debriefed" over beers and pizza at Uno's, and we regaled Sammy with tales of our accomplishments. It was a relaxing way of realizing the problems we faced as a group. The mad rush was not from a lack of motivation, as I had never seen anybody in the group slacking. Instead, our problem was our work on side projects that weren't necessary for today's deadline. We have the motivation, but we don't have the focus.

The real hero of the day was my boss, Mary. She let me have the day off, even though the other student-helper-monkeys were unable to fill in for me.

I chalked up another incredible experience on Sunday with my stint as a security worker for Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, Florida. The job was awful but the experience was awesome, so everything worked out in the end.

Many lessons were learned from Contemporary Services, my employer, and the company that provided security for the game. I have to say that I was largely unsupervised for most of my pointless service. The most supervision I ever had was from some inbred, hayseed cracker who took my map away and gave it to some fans who were asking for info. Most of the time I had no idea of what I should do, and whatever guidance I was given was vague or contradictory. Nobody gave us the answers to common questions, despite our orders to never use the phrase "I don't know." I ended up saying that quite a bit.

I worked with the NFL invitation-only tailgate party. First I was with Squatter, keeping out the guests before the event started. There were a ton of eager Eagles fans but very few Patriot fans en masse. During this time I saw an antique B-25 Mitchell bomber flying overhead, with little idea of its role later in the day. Then I worked at the admission gate. We were never given clear orders as to whether I should give everybody a patdown search or just search select people. I did a little bit of both. There weren't enough female screeners, so I found myself doing a few patdowns on the ladies. I probably felt as uncomfortable about it as they did, but I tried to do it professionally. Finally, I was reassigned to be the "Beer Gestapo," preventing people from leaving the tailgate party with NFL-supplied liquor. I got to work with an old Navy vet and he was a pretty cool guy.

After the tailgate party they rounded us up and sent us to Veterans Memorial Arena for redeployment. It was my first break all day. Unfortunately, it prevented me from seeing the "mother of all flyovers": the first wave was the B-25, flanked by two T-6 Texan trainers. The second wave was two F/A-22's and two Super Hornets. I had never seen an F/A-22 in flight and I was very miffed about it.

I spent most of the game (including the halftime show) in a heated tent eating dinner. There were three small-screen TV's with the volume turned down, so watching the game was a bust. The employees of Contemporary Services openly cursed their company. I have never seen the morale so low in a company before. Then again, I have never seen such disorganization before.

With about 12:20 left in the game, they sent me into the stands to "usher people." That means I got to watch the game. It was a truly magical experience. The energy in that stadium was palpable. I got to see Vinateri's winning kick and Donovan McNabb's TD pass. I also saw a touching display of good sportsmanship. There was one row of drunken, rowdy Patriots fans sitting behind a row of depressed Eagles fans. When the game ended, the Patriots fans congratulated the Eagles fans on a game well-played.

People I worked with got to see many celebrities, including Snoop Dogg and Steven Spielberg and Slick Willy Clinton. The only celebrity (of sorts) that I saw was Donovan McNabb's mom. Unfortunately, she wasn't serving chunky soup.

The ride back home was "cluster fun," in the same way that everything touched by Contemporary Services was a mess. We had to hitch a school bus all the way to a Holiday Inn in Clay, Florida before we could get to our charter bus back to Riddle. Getting everybody accounted for in that cramped inn was like herding cats. I was in charge of a group of freshmen and made sure that they got on the bus. By the time we left for Riddle, two people in our group were still missing. They eventually were found, much to our relief.

Despite all of the idiocy that day, I still think that the final minutes of the game justified the time and money I invested in getting there. It's the most memorable experience I've had since meeting the president on July 22, 2002.

Some good came of this experience. I gave my event staff jacket to Prof. Skovholt because he's a huge Patriots fan. One of the freshmen I was watching sold his jacket to a drunk girl after the game for forty bucks. He could have fetched a lot more on eBay, and so could I. But the smile on Sko's face was priceless.

I was also on a mission that night. I wore my Scott Speicher MIA bracelet to the game, hoping that he could be there in spirit. I don't know what he would have thought if he'd known that the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles would be playing in Super Bowl XXXIX in his home town of Jacksonville. I think he would have been impressed.

Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith is finally getting his posthumous Medal of Honor. It's about time.

Read the rest of the story.

I was worried at first when Iraqi militants claimed to have captured an American soldier. But parts of their story didn't make sense, like their statement that every member of the soldier's unit was captured or killed.

MSNBC is reporting, much to our relief, that the soldier in the militants' photo is not "John Adam" but "Cody," an adult collectible action figure manufactured by Dragon Models USA.

If I cut the heads off my Ninja Turtles as a boy, does that make me a jihadi warrior? Will I get 72 virgins for lopping off Michaelangelo's head with a butter knife? Whoopee!

My attention was first drawn to this piece in Newsweek, by Dickey, Hosenball, and the rest of the Newsweek gang, which is the best exposee the mainstream media has done thus far on the Iraqi insurgency.

Another point that isn't getting any media play in the US is this embarrassing error by the Euro-liberals of the BBC. In July through December 2004, 2041 Iraqis (insurgents, civilians, and security forces combined) were killed in military operations. Apparently this includes the Fallujah death toll, but excludes non-Iraqis.

Opponents of the war for Iraq often cite a figure from The Lancet that 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war began in March 2003. Even assuming that the death toll from the initial invasion was 50,000 people (combatants and civilians combined,) the 100,000 figure is inconsistent with the data from the Iraqi Health Ministry. Even the infamous information minister, Mohammed Saeed al Sahaf, only claimed that 1,200 civilians died during the invasion (at least until the point where he was broadcasting from a rooftop in Baghdad with A-10's streaking overhead and tanks plowing through the streets.)

I submit, for your approval, some evidence regarding the reliability of body counts by The Lancet. Notice that The Lancet's body count is a factor of two greater than the official Serb body count and a factor of eight higher than the NATO estimate.

The Lancet used statistical methods to compare death counts before and after the war. I am unaware of what methods were used to extrapolate the data to the rest of the country. Such methods are horribly inaccurate for Iraq because of the tremendous dichotomy between towns in the Kurdish north, Sunni heartland, and Shiite south. Even their selection of people to survey becomes suspect, as neither the Kurds nor Sunnis nor Shiites make up a monolithic bloc. The Lancet should be equally condemned for not making any distinction between people killed by insurgents versus people killed by the coalition.

When Operation Desert Storm concluded after 38 days of bombing and a 100-hour land campaign, the Pentagon claimed that 70,000-80,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed. Several years later when the media and the Pentagon tried to summarize the war and make some sense of it, the Iraqi death toll dropped dramatically. Iraqi military deaths went below 50,000, and perhaps as low as 30,000. Civilian deaths were estimated in the vicinity of 5,000. Even the infamous "Highway of Death" outside of Basra, which turned world opinion against continuing the war, only had a death toll of less than 40 of the Iraqi soldiers who had looted Kuwait.

On the horrible Tuesday morning when the United States was attacked, it was initially believed that 10,000 people had been killed. Soon the death toll was revised down to 7,000, then finally to the 3,000 figure we use today.

The moral of the story is that initial body counts are wildly inaccurate and based on emotion and a tendency to over-estimate the scope of the catastrophe. After we have waited for a period of time and cooler heads have prevailed, we can accurately quantify the horrors of war.

"That in blessing I will bless thee,
And in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven,
And as the sand which is upon the sea shore;
And thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies"
Genesis 22:17, King James version

As the Lord asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Issac, mankind has often sacrificed its most beloved members in the pursuit of heavenly reward. Two years ago we lost Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Willie McCool, Rick Husband, and Ilan Ramon. They believed in science and exploration, and they believed in a hopeful future for mankind. Humans have always thirsted to explore new frontiers of both science and the vastness that surrounds us. The crew of Columbia did so without fear or regret.

The exploration of space must continue with the same boldness embodied by Columbia's final crew. Humanity cannot be sustained forever as a one-planet species. Adventure will take us back to the moon, to Mars, and on further journeys beyond the edges of imagination. Hope will inspire us to stay there for good. The seed of Columbia and Challenger and the other lost vessels will be mutiplied as the stars of heaven.

Today we pray for Discovery, her crew, and everyone working towards a successful mission this spring. We pray for those we have lost in this ultimate endeavour. And we still pray that all will be safely home.