Flyover Blog

Marching on

Well the month of March is here. I've been somewhat busy lately. Let's see I finally got around to visiting Chris in Cincinnati. Really enjoyed the trip and just hanging out with him, we both agreed it had been too long between visits. I always get a kick out of Chris' selection in beer. Let it be known that he will never be satisfied with your standard 6 pack from the grocery store. His latest is a local microbrewery, claims it was an interesting taste, looks very "locally brewed" indeed

Also got to visit my favorite resturaunt, Montgomery Inn

I always eat well when I with Chris. Oh yeah he's also not satisfied with the normal table fare so we usually end up some place interesting to fill up. Most of Saturday was kind of a dreary rainy cold day. We drove around the eastern side of Cincinnati investigating a state park (East Fork Lake?). The park has a nice sized lake that Chris plans to launch his small sailboat on this summer and practice sailing. Eventually he'd like to move up to something bigger and pack away enough rice, beans and books to sail the open ocean and wait out Armageddon. But alas that's another post He's decided it's time to get in shape and start eating better. We checked out some local gyms in the area. On one extreme was kind of a dingy gym with dated equipment that was low cost, kind of the Rocky Balboa gym. At the other extreme was a Gold's gym where all the pretty people go to show off. I have to say it was a cool place. One room was full of elliptical machines, tread mills and stationary bikes in a darken theater with a movie being played on a large screen. Impressive. Chris also got a pair of really nice glasses. A reminder I need to shell out the money and get a new pair too. Mine are falling apart almost as bad as his were. I have wire ties holding mine together. All bent out of shape, look like a retard with them on. I'll put that on my list of things I have to buy but don't want to. I put my Ford Escape on craiglist.org again. Crossing my fingers I can finally sell that piece of shit. Now with that money in my pocket I'd feel a little better about dropping 5 bills on some glasses that will last me 10 years.

This last Sunday we had Kenzie's birthday party with the whole extended family. Always a good time since Annette's big bushy family comes together. Kenzie finally got her little $99 digital video camera. What a piece of work that is. Perfect for an 11 year old to play around with. Oy vey, the price on it just dropped to $49 with a rebate. I picked up a 1GB SD card for $16 for it and she's having a lot of fun with it. Can't believe how cheap this stuff is getting. I might pick up one for my business since one of my projects involves filming an assembly line. Anyway Annette promised Kenzie that we'd build her a bedroom in the basement since her bedroom is like a closet. Her teenage years are right around the corner and it would be nice for her to have some more room. So that's one of the many projects I have going on this summer.

I've been very busy with work too. Aside from my normal 40 hours at Missouri Botanical Gardens I've been spending a lot of time on a project with Epic. Enjoying both a lot and am trying to balance it with family life. I feel it's working out fine. Went to Kenzie's elementary school's talent show last week. That was a lot of fun to watch. Some of those kids are pretty good. One little Asian girl played a beautiful classical piano piece on an old beat up school piano. She was so small her feet couldn't even reach the pedals. Dang did it sound good though. This one doughy 4th grader got up on stage with his electric guitar and belted out Iron Man. Too cool. Kenzie was up there kicking up an Irish dance in her traditional outfit. You know looking back on 5th grade, I don't remember anyone having any talent other than playing kickball. I do remember a school play we did in 5th grade. We did Tom Sawyer and it was pretty good if memory serves me right. All I remember is our teacher was a frustrated playright. We pretty much tossed the books aside and practiced the whole school day on this play for several weeks. I can remember her in the back of the gym on the piano and yelling at us to sing loud enough so she can hear us over the piano all the way across the gym. So the kids who had to sing were hitting those notes hard. I can remember as 5th graders we would get distracted and the teacher would stay on us, repeating over and over that if the ceiling falls in we do are not to notice it but continue singing. When opening night came around I remember watching one of my friends sing Old Man River and looking out at the parents who were all wiping tears out of their eyes. Even though my mom is biased she still says to this day the play was professional quality. Would have been nice to have video cameras back then!

Lets see anything in the news worthy of comments? Hmm... I guess you can say I very unimpressed with both Hillary Clinton and Obama. What a couple of clowns.. geez. Does anyone take those pinheads seriously? They are exactly what is wrong with the political system. When ask about allowing gays in the military neither one of them could answer the question. They skirted the question completely. Both of them are democrat, the party of the people, the party of liberal social change at least the last time I checked. Should be a no brainer, swish in the basket for 2 points. Why can't they at least stand up for what they truly believe in? I got news for both of you, people who hate gays are not going to vote for you anyway, you have nothing to lose!!! Right now I'd be impressed if any of the candidates would take any stand at all. Bunch of wimps. This country needs a real leader not another dum ass politician. There's a congressman from California that "came out of the closet" recently and said he is an atheist. I applaud him for having more balls than the whole lot of current presidential hopefuls. What else is going on... Well there's Iraq and the complete abandonment of any sense of logic with that whole shit hole. It's going to take years for our country to climb back to it's former position of world respect. My god what a complete screwup our president is. It's indicative of his failure when many news articles are talking about the general anxious mood the country is in hoping that Bush doesn't screw things up anymore than he has in his last 18 months in office.

Ok it's bed time, time to cut the blogging off.  

The sheep look up

It seems lately there's been a rash of injustice going on in this country. The latest one is particularly scary because it involves the government's abuse of anti-terrorism laws and sentiment. It involves an autistic young man who is a brilliant physicist studying cutting edge string theory. As a functioning autistic his social skills are almost nil and will use bad judgment in social situations. This is what ultimately landed him in trouble. Somebody convinced him to go on a vandalism spree to eco bumper stickers on Hummers and SUV's throughout California. Well as things like this go, the bumper stickers turned into spray paint and finally into firebombs. He was arrested, tried and convicted and is now spending 8 years in prison. Now that thing that is worrying is how the judge labeled him a terrorist, in the sense of eco-terrorist and decided to add on 3 years to his original 5 year sentence because of the terrorist label. The judge's sense of right and wrong was left out of his thinking and instead used his emotional brain to make a decision. Once in prison it was assumed he would not mingle with the prison population but would be given a prison desk job where he could continue studying physics and wait out his term. But the prison warden decided to make him an example on how to deal with terrorist and didn't trust him being given light supervision. After all he could make a bomb and blow up the boilers. The prison guards mistreat him regularly, refuse to give him the physics papers his colleagues send to him, refuse to let him study Chinese and call him a terrorist to his face. When a group of scientists including Stephen Hawking sent a letter to the California courts to reconsider his case the prison guards found out and threw him solitary. The same thing happened when he refused to answers questions concerning a fellow inmate who was Chinese and was acting as his interpreter. You can read up on the story here.

Whenever I hear people complain that the liberals are making a big deal out of the federal government unauthorized tapping our phone lines, reading our email, suspending habeas corpus or the Patriot Act. They argue, hey if you have nothing to hide, let the government find the real terrorists, give them the tools they need. I try to explain to them that it's a very slippery slope. This physicist story is a good example of a bad slip in the abuse of power that's allowed to happen to pursue the latest bogey man (20 years ago it was the Communist). When you lower the bar a lot of good people are going to get trampled on. It's the old adage, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Our government's response to terrorism is endemic of a far larger problem in our country, which is the rise of the nanny state. Instead of trusting the citizens to fight terrorism as a united front much like this country did during WW2, they treat them like the sheep that they are and have been raised to be. Our government is no longer as effective as it once was because good honest people no longer want to be apart of the democratic process, either through the simplest act of voting or holding office. Anyone you ask views all levels of government as corrupt and surrounded by lazy incompetent people. Who would want to be involved with that mess? So as a result you end up with a government run by lazy incompetent people who are easily corrupted by self-interest. How does a government like this govern? Well the easiest and laziest way possible by taking the easy road in all cases. When there is social conflict you pass a law to remove a freedom and debate. When there is social unrest you quell it by throwing money on the fire which creates an expectation of entitlements piled upon more entitlements. In the end you have a lazy government making sure the sheep are fat and happy instead of building a society that can tackle difficult times. My fear is that this country could not handle an economic depression or a real live war (not one where we bomb brown people from a safe distance). We are no longer capable of sacrificing or being united. Sure we wave our flags and pat ourselves on our backs when looking back on our past accomplishments but we have no concept of sacrificing a meal in order to help feed a neighbor. In our delusional entitlement world that's completely foreign to us. Sure I think most Americans are good at heart and can accomplish wonderful things but you know what, so are sheep. It's something to think about as we head into the coming resource depletion years on the horizon. I don't think the answer will ever come from the government but instead must come from the people in some from. How and when I do not know but it must start soon.

Fly me to the moon

I saw this posting on Slashdot today, thought it was very insightful concerning the new NASA push to return to the moon and the idea of using inflatable tents to house the astronauts --

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NASA is going to try to make going to the moon as risk free as possible. This habitat is an example of risk aversion. Caves, though riskier, offer several advantages. They’re bigger, they offer better solar storm protection. The downside is finding them and then sealing them. So instead, NASA is choosing to take a little cubicle up that has a higher probability of providing some protection for very few people. What’s worse is that as soon as somebody dies there’ll be tremendous pressure to shut it down which will encourage NASA to be even more risk averse. 
 
Going to the Moon is risky and is going to require a variety of strategies to succeed and people are going to die. 150 years ago, folks who wanted to come west tried whatever way made sense to them to get out here. Lots of folks died trying to get here but more folks survived and prospered. Had NASA run the western expansion, we’d all still be in New York. 
 
Instead, the billions of dollars NASA will waste would be better spent setting up prizes to get people to risk their necks to get to the moon. The X-Prize showed that you get more people spending more money than the prize value to win the prize. You don’t even have to make it all money. Heck Pennsylvania was a land grant that paid off a royal debt. Give people who can settle and produce something on the moon property rights to the land and whatever they produce and we’ll see a resurgence of pioneers willing to try it. 
 
Since people can’t walk to the moon like some walked to the West, NASA could say “we’ll pay $20,000,000 for each settler you safely deliver to the Moon’s surface. We’ll pay $500,000 for each ton of provisions.” and you’d see a wealth of companies spring up to ship people to the moon. If the prices are wrong, NASA could adjust as needed. Instead of 4 or 5 inhabitants for $100 Billion, you’d see 1000’s. 
 
You’ll see lots of people die just like they have before but you’ll see survivors as well. Those are the people who should populate the moon, not government employees.

 </snip>

Couldn't have said it better myself. NASA's usefulness for manned spaceflight is past. They are typical with what's wrong with government, too big, too bureaucratic and not focused on the reason they exist -- to create programs to research science that has no market. Manned spaceflight has a market (right now a small market of billionaires) and NASA is turning into a dumping ground for tax dollars. NASA should focus it's efforts on real science like sending probes to asteroids, robot rovers to Mars and telescopes into orbit. In fact why don't we just let NASA die off completely. Let us watch the rest of the world do real science with their budgets and hopefully it will inspire us to create a new NASA. One that is devoted to scientific research and not in the business of launching weather and military satellites and wasting everyone's time and money trying to colonize the moon.

By the way, Afterslash is a great site to read the Slashdot comments without all of noise.