Listing Benefits of Security Guarantees

The only question that we ought to ask ourselves is, “Why give Zelensky what he wants?”

For ease of thought, modify it slightly to, “Why allow Ukraine into NATO?”

  1. We believe Ukrainian lives are worth protecting at immense cost to our own lives.
  2. We believe there is some moral benefit, ie “the gods will be pleased” if we help those who cannot help themselves.
  3. We believe there is some practical long term benefit, such as “preventing future problems” as Zelensky seemed to have in mind when he uttered the “nice ocean” bit.
  4. We believe the wealth generated by the “get rich off minerals” idea actually does outweigh the cost of war or ongoing difficulties with Russia.
  5. We simply believe that we must not let the man Putin achieve his desires.

That’s what I can come up with. What about you?

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To be clear, Ukraine does not satisfy the clearly established requirements for joining NATO. So no one needs to spend any brain cells on “Why not allow Ukraine into NATO?” Instead, the issue is literally, “What’s in it for me?”

I am very excited to see how this plays out. For time capsule purposes, my gut today says, “Zelensky is out. Trump gets deal done afterwards (no new security guarantees, definitely no NATO)—which amounts to ‘can kicked down the road’. And this is fine. No need to solve every problem immediately.”

Lastly, a longstanding talking point for my entire life (and yours) has been “Russia/communists educate/train/propagandize whatever group they are trying to defeat.” It’s generally been used as the explanation of the degradation of American universities. But today I heard the claim in reference to Ukrainian students.

Does anyone actually believe this is how life works? That you just kidnap/lure people and put them in classrooms and then in the long game you win? What a joke. It’s past time to stop indulging in that joke/conspiracy theory. People have minds and can reason for themselves. If they reason poorly, that is because they are poor reasoners, not because they are victims of some boogie man’s “long game.”

It Sounds Like My Wife and I

As the family listened to Zelensky and Trump last night at dinner, though I knew my wife (Dark MAGA) could tell Trump(/Vance) won, I also had to chuckle because the argument Trump/Vance made was almost precisely the one I often find myself making.

“Recognize the facts!” we say in unison to the weak.

Unlike all the hypsters and hucksters, I am not worried about the future on the world or family scale. But I do confess that in both situations I am not sure what happens next. In my marriage, all I see is predictable error after predictable error. Will this end in tragedy? Probably not. But maybe.

What will happen on the world stage? I don’t know. But I like the historian (can’t recall his name, Stephen Kotkin?) who said, “War is always a miscalculation.”

Feels Like I’m Just Losing When It Comes To Cars

Financing used cars is the only way to go right now. But when any mechanical issues appear, the monthly payment skyrockets. Add Colorado insurance prices—and the raison d’etre—and driving a car at all becomes obscenely expensive.

I’m just coming off a false alarm “you need a new engine” on one vehicle, and a totaled-out second vehicle. This wreck was fortunate in a way because it was a high-mileage rust bucket. We got more from the kid’s insurance than we ever would have even as a trade. Yet, the plan was to keep it until the step-son needed wheels, at which point he gets the old car and, well you know the story. Now who knows when he’ll start driving.

Now this newer (still a 2017) used car seems to have a leak. Maybe it’s a fluke. I’ll find out soon enough. But it puts me in a foul mood.

I just want to read, you know? The toddlers are in bed. I just want some reading time.

Too tired for Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” Not even in the mood for an early X-Men comic. There’s always a Jack London freezing Alaska tale, but not tonight.

Anyhow, I have my stupid rule about reading at least a chapter from the Bible before anything else. Hmm. I’m in Two Chronicles (ha). It’s actually not terrible because of its summarizing. It is kinda nice to breeze through the history so quickly, from such a high-level, AND know that it’s still the Word of God.

I feel better already. Probably gonna hit the next chapter on that and then see about Hawking.

Oh well. Going snowshoeing with the toddlers tomorrow.

One day at a time.

“…Hold Short of Runway Three One Center”

Way back in Iraq, our squadron commander told us (as crews of a helicopter that would nightly fly America’s special operations forces to their nighttime raids), “If any of you were to crash, it’d headline international news.”

I took his meaning to be, “I know this seems routine, and that routine can seem insignificant, but it’s not. You’re doing good work for America.” In short, he was keeping the troops motivated.

Naturally, it was also a true claim. If 30+ special operations troops crashed and died, that would be international news. This is true to this day.

But today, even aviation events where no one has died are making the news cycle.

For you, the non-pilot, I want to offer two pieces of perspective. Firstly, how would you like it if every single mistake you made on the job went viral? That’s right. And that’s why you’re not a pilot. And you shouldn’t be one.

Secondly, this near-miss at Midway has the same feature as the mid-air in DC. The pilot said he would do the right thing but he did not. How should this be accounted for?

For me it is simple. I have to maintain a hyper-sensitive honesty.

In the case of the DC mid-air, after I (in role of BH pilot) had said, “Traffic in Sight” the first time, if I found myself queried a second time (which is what happened), I’d have to trust that my well-honed honesty would have pricked my snowflakely-sensitive conscience as usual and then I would have said to tower, “Ahh, actually I am not sure what traffic you’re referring to. Can you point him out?” (I mean to bring to bear that I would intentionally use those non-standard phrases to call to Tower’s attention that the situation is abnormal and needing renewed attention, even as the words also suggest as much.)

In this case, at Midway, given the extreme situation of the news hyping every single aviation procedural aberration they catch wind of, the minute my clearance had changed (to be sure, there was some totally normal, but not strictly necessary, back-and-forth clarification between the pilot and Ground Control), I would have made the decision to stop prior to every runway and double-check if I was cleared across. This would be totally unnecessary and actually annoying and that is the point. The Ground guy would, then, display his hatred of me as he cleared me individually like I was a child (but apparently capable of being a pilot), but it would have pricked his conscience that I thought something was needing extra attention—the something being either 1. a weak pilot, 2. a weak controller, or 3. some as of yet uncommunicated circumstance.

Generally, aviation communication requires extreme eloquence and purpose—which amounts to an exceedingly small and standard vocabulary. Because of this fact, simply using plain language is a tool the pilot and ATC can employ without blatantly calling each other names when the situation arises. I’m not kidding. Believe you, me, when life and death are at stake, the desire to jump to full throttle on some moron, who is sitting in an air conditioned room totally free from danger, at the slightest unnecessary increase of risk with, “Go eff yourself!”, or conversely, the desire to put a supposed demi-god who believes himself to be the spiritual offspring of Maverick in place with, “I used English and you speak English!” or similar, is very real. (And I would argue appropriate and inescapable given the stakes.) The point here is demi-gods who are, in fact, the spiritual offspring of Maverick know how to use subtle and nuanced methods to get the attention they most assuredly deserve. And as you groundlings highlight to the world every day, we deserve a lot of your attention.

****

The last thing that you need to know is while parts of the media coverage emphasize the fact that the two planes were not on the same channel, this is fake news. Don’t be stupid people. Ground handles traffic on the ground, and Tower handles traffic in the air, and other channels handle other parts of the airspace system.

The problem of radio communication is it requires “one at a time”. To imply that everyone needs to be on one channel is completely without forethought.

Reading Log 2.21

Seems like I’ve been saying it for so long that everyone should know, but ICYMI, Last of the Mohicans is actually one of five (5) books Cooper wrote starring Natty Bumpoo/Hawkeye/Deerslayer/Pathfinder, or more commonly, Daniel Day-Lewis. The Pathfinder is 3 of 5, taking place after LOTM events—and without reference to them.

It is just great. I have read three now and plan to pace the remaining two Leatherstocking Tales so that I don’t peak too soon before death. Nothing makes me want to go camp and hike and scout and track like Cooper’s tales.

The Aliens epic collection was alright. Nothing great. But it did have some interesting storylines and the art was beautiful. One thing that that volume unexpectedly contained was a sort of short story, written in prose. And that story was graphic as anything I have come across. I have previously been made acquainted with the works of an author named Neil Gaiman and these cause one to blush. This story was along those lines. Most Alien stories have the lead as female, and this time she is only able to perform her heroine duties because of the abuse she suffered as a little girl. Bluntly, parallels are made in the story between her waiting on the monsters, and her waiting on the monster. Sick stuff.

Oh. And like the comment I made about how reading too many comics in a row kinda highlights the undeveloped-ness/infantile-ness of these stories, I now more clearly see that every Alien story ends with the main character learning that despite the recent total victory (extermination), one xenomorph embryo still exists and is poised to makes its way to another human settlement. I hadn’t really noticed that just from the movies. Oh well.

Relativity.

Here’s what I’ll do. These are the few summative statements Eddington offers. Comment below if you find them useful.

“A gravitational field of force is precisely equivalent to an artificial field of force, so that in any small region, it is impossible by any conceivable experiment to distinguish between them. In other words, force is relative.”

Actually, that is the only one that makes sense for a blog post. The big analogy that Einstein developed was the elevator (or “lift” if you’re reading in the mother country). Newton, you’ll recall, realized that if “bodies in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon etc”, then the Moon would have long ago kept going right past Earth, as Earth would have kept right on going past the Sun etc. The force that keeps the orbits is called gravity. Einstein, then, realized that artificial “gravity”, literally the kind you feel at the beginning of an elevator ride, is experimentally no different than “real” gravity.

Okay. Relativity is interesting but I prefer the universe stuff. (And am scheduled to read more on that next.)

Lastly, I want to conclude with probably the most fun takeaway from the book. It is from the chapter “Weighing Light”.

“It is legitimate to speak of a pound of light as we speak of a pound of any other substance. The mass of ordinary qualities of light is however extremely small, and I have calculated that at the low charge of 3d. a unit, an Electric Light Company would have to sell light at the rate of £140 million a pound. All the sunlight falling on the Earth amounts to 160 tons daily.”

“Decide”, A Review of Mothers’ Instinct by Benoit Delhomme

If you’ve somehow hesitated on this one, rest assured that it is worth watching. It isn’t perfect. But compared to all the other trash that is being proffered as “movies” these days, it is a return to the classic definition. (You don’t even want to know what my co-workers were about to watch when I came to the rescue.)

The tone was perfectly subdued, precisely unpronounced. No one holds your hand and points out what to notice. You either get it (and are disturbed in the titillating manner you found appealing) or you probably are bored and never really wanted to watch it.

As far as the leading ladies, Hathaway performs her role better than Chastain. But she also has the easier task.

The best part of the film is how the immediate fallout from the boy’s death is so natural. By way of comparison, consider the tragic mid-air. People’s reactions have centered on personal responsibility (pilot error) vs. systemic failure (FAA/ATC). And that debate is crazy to me. It’s actually why I choose to fly. I have ultimate authority for the safety of the flight. Not many jobs offer that.

As a recap, the helicopter pilot said, “Traffic in sight.” And then we all learned that he did not have the traffic in sight.

In this movie, the tragic death is more purely accidental. The trick, or hinge, to it is that one mother happened to see it coming but couldn’t get there in time, and the other mother should have been watching. But, different than the pilot, the boy never said, “I know I might die if I am wrong, but I am not wrong.”

I say all this to bring to the forefront that the post-tragedy questions “how to respond” and “how to interpret with and deal with others’ responses” are totally distinct from the mid-air’s “how to prevent this from ever happening again” question.

Moreover, the truly fascinating aspect of the plot is how powerfully the story debunks utopian notions of how good life could become if only. Life is great, people. But death is a part of life.

Death is a part of life. You don’t want life to be worse because of death. So talk about it. Think about it. Prepare for it. As a topic, death should be no different than meals or clothes or relationships.

Ultimately, I want to say this. If you feel death approaching, say, at the hands of an unstable woman, flee! It’s best not to hesitate on that one.

Quit Complaining About the Eggs

Quit complaining about the price of eggs.

How, you ask? Easy. Eat steak.

Now that the prices are comparable, I have been eating 1/2 petite sirloin steaks—perfecting a cast iron pan fry—for breakfast as the rest of the country questions themselves into lunacy.

And I like it! Who wants eggs, when you can eat steak?

Urge is Returning

I haven’t felt like writing much of late. It wasn’t writer’s block that stopped me. I always have plenty to say. It was the fact that you’re not supposed/allowed to share patient data and so I couldn’t say much more than I did about my last work week. And then, while I often like myself better because I indulge in providing the forever internet precise examples of the terrible realities of marriage, sometimes I just can’t keep sharing them, which, yes, implies last week was doubly rough. So those two things kept me quiet.

But.

I just clicked on a video of Kamala stumping to some thespians and the way she gets to her point is to say, “Nature abhors a vacuum.”

I mentioned in earlier posts that I would someday give my reasons for reading the Great Books of the Western World (and classics in general). Immediately, then, fulfilling my vow came to mind. After all, Pascal is the “great” who singlehandedly took down this claim that “nature abhors a vacuum.” How? By treating it earnestly. He merely asked, “How can nature have a feeling?” (It is totally appropriate to think, “That’s it?” Yes. That’s it. We, all of us, have a duty to call out confusing assertions—though giving the benefit of the doubt to the author is always the best until you are certain they mean what you initially thought.)

See how that works?

But then (getting back to me and my desire to make a small contribution to this world) I thought, “So what are you trying to say? That the Great Books are necessary to know she is a moron?” To which I answered, “Good point.”

I don’t know how any knowledge of Pascal is needed to recognize how stupid Kamala Harris is. However, if pressed, I could admit that knowing Pascal and how that particular phrase really did motivate him to end one strain of stupidity may be valuable when talking to an educated (at least a proper Bachelor’s) Harris supporter. The tactic being, “You know Pascal destroyed that notion which was previously holding science back, right? Nature doesn’t love or hate. It doesn’t emote or have purpose. You do know that, right?”

But on the whole, I can admit I just get excited when I see morons more clearly than before. It’s like the clarity is exciting, not the ugly picture.

Anyhow. The urge to write is returning. Not quite back. But this is feeling good.

As a parting gift, here is some Pascal.

Rougher Work Week

In Heat, the cop played by Pacino returns late to the ritzy bar his wife lingered at and she starts in with, “And I bought into sharing. But this isn’t sharing. This is leftovers.” (Or what is the same.)

Pacino responds, “Oh I get it. You want me to come home and tell you that some junkie just put his baby in the microwave because it was crying too much. And somehow this will…” and on and on. (Or similar.)

Later in the movie while desperately trying to keep someone he knows alive, he says, “Not you, baby.”

Suffice it to say, these scenes, not the particulars but the emotions and complications, come straight from real life—which I would say is exactly why I love that movie and have always loved that movie.

In real life, as I have written before, my own reaction is a sudden and unaccounted for need to cry. I didn’t this time. But all the necessary variables were in play.

There is a great desire to ask, “What can fix the scene(s)?” Or “How can we help people?”

But I have come to believe, “This is the scene. You don’t fix it. You don’t help. You just play your role. And you hope that your society has good roles.”

From the earliest age I knew my role was “anonymous, systematized, called-in relief”.

It’s mostly rewarding.

My 4-Yr Old Recognized Beauty

She FT’d me as they were walking into the garage to leave for mega-church. The door opened, and the way she holds the camera it was difficult to not notice the barely cloud-speckled blue sky. Then I saw she did too. And without prompting she said, “It’s a beautiful day,” and faded almost into a hum, “in the neighborhood,” which is of course from Daniel the Tiger or whatever the name of the Mr. Roger’s-based show is called. (Not that she has seen it in several months since I tossed the TV, but I feel like being clear that she isn’t an abstract idea floating around in the aether, but a little girl.)

Anyhow, it’s true.

And that’s the point I want to make to all you anxiety-driven, suicide-prone, depression-claimants. Take a look at the lilies of the field. If my four year old can see them, then surely they are there.