Paradox of Idolization

Andrew Sullivan is clearly not a parent.

Child: Mom, I'm going to smoke pot.
Parent: No you aren't.
Child: But my hero, Michael Phelps, with 14 Olympic medals, the one you told me works so hard and I should look up to him, smokes pot.
Parent: ...


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Then again

I am incredibly disappointed at Conservatives for forcing the $1.4 billion allocated to the National Science Foundation for medical research to be dropped from the stimulus package.

This is a terrible, terrible policy. Not only does NSF research make a real impact in the world, but that money is spent paying the salaries of college professors and grad students, and would have provided many, many brilliant minds with jobs here in the U.S.

If you wanted a good stimulus idea, providing jobs for brainiacs would have been it. Not to mention the expensive research equipment used for medical research is by-and-large built and sold here in the States, and would have provided trickle down revenue to many American businesses.

Sadness.


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Short term memory

Remember when Bush wanted to pass his $700 billion dollar bailout and was cramming it down our throats that it needed to get passed NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW without debate or modification?

How is Obama not doing exactly the same thing? In general, when the government says "don't debate this, just trust us, we know what we're doing" it turns out that they had no idea what they were doing, and were just being pompous grandstanders.

If there is a person somewhere in America that will literally lose their job today unless the stimulus gets passed (but will keep it if the stimulus is passed today) then to you I apologize. But the rest of America takes pride in their ability to talk about a thing, and even Dems will recognize that TARP was passed way too fast without enough oversight built in.

Relax Obama, if it is a good piece of legislation, it will eventually pass, in a better form. That is how politics works.


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Cosmic City

Recent efforts by Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Institution to combine data from the Hubble space telescope with the new Spitzer space telescope have revealed the hotbed of young stars in the center of the galaxy.
For those not acquainted with the Milky Way architecture, the center of the galaxy is believed to be inhabited by a massive black hole, which keeps the galaxy together and spinning. The five major arms of the galaxy spiral outward from the center, and several hundred billion stars populate these five arms.
Scientists have determined that our solar system lies quite a ways outward from the center, but not near the outside of the Milky Way galaxy, in an area known as the "galactic habitable zone." Closer to the center, stars are hotter, and closer together, and if planets existed they'd be constantly bombarded with radiation. Farther out from the center matter is much more spread out, and heavier elements necessary to harbor life as we know it is less available.

So here's my question: Is the Milky Way nothing more than the galactic version of a major city? You've got your black hole core, which represents the inner city slums that are to be avoided, or at least aren't ideal for life. Then farther out you have the hot, busy section where things are crowded and noisy, at least in radiation terms. Farther out yet you have the galactic suburbs, aka the habitable zone, where planets are (probably) plentiful and the conditions for life are better. Farther out yet you have your exurbs, aka the areas of the galaxy where life, if it could exist, is sparse and rural.
So, hundreds of years from now, when humanity invents a Jump Drive should we consider urban planning and the lessons learned from modern city organization when our species colonizes the galaxy?
Should we send farming colonies to the outer rim, where basic elements like hydrogen and helium are plentiful, but anything heavier than carbon isn't likely to be found? And should we overpopulate the inner zone, turning it into a seething mass of inhabited planets with mass transit and all the features of a large city? Will it become expensive and lucrative to inhabit a planet in the galactic habitable zone? Will we have planet development firms buy groups of planets and give them kitschy names, like "Loch Lloyd Star System" or "The Intergalactic: A Retirement Planet Community" and only the wealthiest of space travelers will be able to afford the overpriced planets there? Something to think about.

In the meantime, anyone seen my drawings of the Jump Drive I invented? I can't seem to find them anywhere.


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Obama's Private Army II

The thing that is weird about Obama and the DoD legalizing involuntary military recruiting is that I haven't seen news about it ANYWHERE. I don't want to accuse the media of a liberal bias here, but the media seems so tuned to the stimulus, and how the Republicans are bitterly fighting against it, that other news (that may have a much more far reaching effect) is getting buried.


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Daschle

The thing about Tom Daschle that really struck me was that "wow, $140,000 in taxes? and that was only part of his tax burden. How much does that guy make in a year, to have that kind of money in box 2 of his W-2?"

That's three times what the average American makes in a year, and to him it was just a "vague misinterpretation of whether chauffeurs are tax deductible" or some snobbish nonsense like that.


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Obama's plan to privatize the military

I'm not one to jump on the anti-government, survivalist fringe very often, and most of the time I listen to those people is when I want camping advice.
On a parallel (we'll see in a second) I stopped listening to Michael Savage about 2 months ago, because I just couldn't listen to someone that hateful anymore, I needed, at least once in a while, to hear something uplifting. However, one issue that Michael Savage harped on that I vividly remember was that he thought Obama was going to create his own private civilian army, equal to the actual Armed Forces, to be used at Obama's discretion. Savage claimed Obama would use this civilian force like the ThoughtPolice of 1984. Or he'd get rid of the military and only keep his private civilian army, much the way the Musketeers were disbanded in favor of the Cardinals personal guards in the movie The Three Musketeers.

I, of course, was skeptical, because that kind of fearmongering is ridiculous and counterproductive to conservative agendas.

However when I found out that Obama had actually planned and executed the very plan that Savage had warned, I was more than a little mystified. Apparently Obama has created a "Civilian Expeditionary Force" who will act in parallel to the U.S. Armed Forces and will answer to the Defense Department, i.e. Obama. The force shall be made up of DoD civilians who voluntarily (and are recruited involuntarily if need be) deploy to hostile locations to promote U.S. interests. You can read the DoD announcement here and the actual legislation here.

Of course, by linking those two articles I probably have now opened myself up to being investigated for sedition. At least, that's what my survivalist friends think.

Now here's the thing that they told me that I actually believe. Obama is going to use this Civilian Expeditionary Force as a way to legally hire the soon to be unemployed Blackwater to stay in Iraq while pulling our troops out. That way, he can say "I'm bringing the troops home and installing civilian security" and the liberals will proclaim job well done, we got those boys out of Iraq, meanwhile, the U.S. military presence in Iraq, and the massive amount of money being spent there, will continue.

Now, maybe I'm overreacting. But then again, a DoD directive that states that DoD employees can be involuntarily forced to fight in hostile environments? Something doesn't smell right here.


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