To continue my latest obsession, I present a new Schoolhouse Rock video called "Pirates and Emporers"
Posted on 2007-11-16 at 22:07
when I can see the light of day again (work has ramped up a bit in the last month) there will be original content on the blog again. Til then, this video says all I feel like saying right now:
Colonel Davy Crockett, Explorer and Congressman (1786-1836)
Posted on 2007-11-12 at 20:18
"Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have."
Fuck anyone that tells me to give up anything out of fear. Terrorism scares me far less than my own government slowly peeling my freedoms away, one onion layer at a time.
Citing Proof
Posted on 2007-11-09 at 23:16
In a response to yesterday's blog entry, someone asked my to cite my sources for those fairly serious accusations.
In "9/11: Interviews by Peter Jennings" on ABC News and airing on September 11, 2002, Peter Jennings interviewed Colonel Robert Marr of the U.S. Air Force (among others). The Colonel was in charge of NEADS (the Air National Guard component of NORAD, the North American Air National Defense Command). In that interview the Colonel said, "We had 14 aircraft on alert, seven sites, two aircraft at each site." The BBC corroborated the quote and offered more details on the ramifications of an unarmed Air Force in an article entitled "US considered 'suicide jet missions'".
More fascinating than that is that 14 was considered above average. On the morning of 9/11, they were doing significant training exercises. On most days, there would have been fewer aircraft on duty across the US.
Our DOD budget exceeds $400 billion, most of which is spent on overseas operations. Our Air Force is in a better position to protect Seoul, Tokyo, Berlin, and London than New York. I stand by my blog-claim: Policing the world and bombing people that pose no serious threat to our interests leaves our country and its borders largely undefended. 9/11 was proof of that. 14 aircraft left to defend the whole of the U.S. airspace (I mean, unless you think that unarmed F-15's taking kamakazi runs into an enemy is a valid defense?) wasn't enough then, and it's not enough now.
National Defense and the Art of Incompetence
Posted on 2007-11-08 at 21:07
On September 11th, 2001, there were only fourteen aircraft in place to defend the entire continental Unites States. The results of that piss poor national defense plan were made clear on the skylines of Northern Virginia and New York City. What was our government's answer? They took what was left of our military and moved them to other countries. We now have even fewer national defenses on the mainland. Twenty thousand American soldiers have been seriously wounded or killed in the Iraq war.
So tell me, how does reducing the military presence inside our own borders and taking 9% of our troops out of active combat-readiness through wounding or death make me safer?
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote, published in 1604
Posted on 2007-11-07 at 21:07
Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
Sometimes I worry that I identify too greatly with the Ingenious Knight of La Mancha. It's not that I think the world doesn't need people willing to tilt at giants, real and imagined, but rather that things didn't end well for the Don.
In the end, Quixote is left disillusioned with humanity---his fleeting bliss fading in favor of a solemn sanity while he turns his back on the very civility that once gave his life meaning. He dies melancholy, hopeless, and broken.
I'm not down with that part.