Come On Thinkers!

I have always thought that political party members were among the least qualified or suited to make important decisions for the country, and one of the few bits of good news as we enter into another intelligence-insulting, criminally-supported campaign season is that more and more people are agreeing.

Pew Research reports that since the end of the Bush Administration, more Americans have begun calling themselves Independents than either of the two idiot parties (err...I mean political parties) - the highest percentage in 75 years of polling. Furthermore, the trend is continuing upward while the parties continue their downward spiral in acolytes.

Full Report Details

Time to Scare You Again

It has been awhile since we have talked about global warming and overall climate change. There are lots of areas that have upcoming problems....some closer than others. Folks in New York and Florida anywhere near the ocean may want to consider selling before too long.

F-35 Fiasco Marches On

The latest news about the nearly a decade overdue and obscenely over budget F-35 is in, and if anything it is getting much worse.  The gurgling on this drain has just about stopped...the only thing remaining is only last, final belch as the whole thing disappears (unfortunately not without taking a lot of tax dollars straight into the under-performing defense industry with it).

For the latest on this plane that can't fly, shoot, keep the pilot safe (or even necessarily in control of the aircraft), here is a summary of the main problems, and here are the details, both courtesy of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) which has been watching this expensive, slow-moving disaster unfold.

If you haven't been following this since the beginning, this is the first Pentagon weapons program that was purchased lock, stock, and barrel with a blank check based essentially on a bunch of notes scribbled on the back of napkin.  The defense contractors sold a Republican-dominated Congress on the concept of "trust us - we will design it as we go along and we will make you a great airplane".

Of course, receptive (of campaign contributions) Senators and Representatives of both parties thought that sounded like a good deal.  Oddly enough, one of the things the Pentagon agreed to in this unprecedented mess was that the defense contractors did not have to prove its combat readiness before approval of an initial production rate of 57 aircraft annually. 

For those with Neiman Marcus Christmas budgets, there may be some very pricey lawn ornaments available this year.        

If You Like to Think Impossible Thoughts

If, like Lewis Carroll you have the kind of mind that likes to "think impossible thoughts", then you probably like good sci-fi literature.  I recently finished one of the best I have encountered in this genre, and here is my Goodreads review.

Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel by David Gatewood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow! There actually aren't enough stars here (or elsewhere) to express my rating of this collection.

I am a very finicky Sci-Fi fan - dungeons and dragons and anything revolving around swords or special weapons are out, and so are most dystopian works unless they are truly intelligent and actually have some science in them. Alternative futures/pasts I am pretty cool with, and true hard-SF of the Asimov/Clark/Bova and successors I am very into.

But I have always had a soft spot for what is generically called "time travel", although I went into this book expecting maybe at most a collection of creative but well-known paradox stories - "don't shoot your grandfather" kinds of things.

Boy, was I ever wrong! To paraphrase an American idiom - let's just say I think my socks are now firmly in some other time...and I am not too sure I want to chase after them after reading this extremely imaginative, creative, wrenching and hit-between-the-eyes-and-your-brain collection.

Nick Cole wrote a fair warning in the foreword that maybe I didn't quite pay enough attention to:

Time.

The great human enemy. Maybe the greatest. It's beaten everyone so far. The scoreboard doesn't lie:

Time: an immense, incalculable number
Us: 0

The rest of Nick's foreword is well worth reading, and he previews the general storylines that follow, but in fairness to him, it is not really possible to fully prepare you for it.

What follows is an incredible series of stories, unlike the usual time travel stuff in any way. Yes there are a few mild paradoxes thrown in, but the key is that this collection is about people - humans, and their individual battles/compromises/surrenders to time. They are about incredible situations and tests of our humanness, and humanity that just wouldn't happen if we stopped opening that door marked "Time", but then we wouldn't be human would we?

I won't single out any of the individual stories because they are all wonderful in their own way. They will make you gasp, scream, cry (more than once) and even laugh in a couple spots. But most of all, they will make you wonder, and think. And that is what great sci-fi is all about!

View all my reviews

There Really Is a Problem

As this analysis points out, we in the US are way out on a planet by ourselves when compared to the rest of the world in terms of numbers of guns and numbers of gun deaths.

 

Every once in awhile, an event like this one comes along to reinforce the image:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-woman-fatally-shot-self-while-adjusting-bra-holster/

Air Force Shenanigans

A follow-up to my earlier post on the campaign in the Air Force to get rid of the A-10 "Wart Hog" aircraft, a tried and true fighting machine that everyone except the Air Force brass wants to keep, partly because there is no faith that the dismal, incredibly expensive (and so far highly incompetent) F-35 is ever going to be able to take its place.

 

It turns out now that the Ari Force has been getting "creative" in what they let out in terms of statistics and data around the A-10: http://www.pogo.org/our-work/articles/2015/af-hq-declassified-and-released-incomplete-data.html.

 

Of course, one would hardly expect less of the Pentagon Sinkhole, which has been part of an ongoing series here and I am sure will continue to be for a long time to come.

A Weird Week of Republicans Shooting Their Mouths Off

Not exactly what David Brooks said, but close.  Another edition of Shields and brooks that gets to the heart of what really counts in the bizarre and sometimes very off-base stories that the media chooses to cover.  


Personally, I prefer the days before trending "Twits" determined a news organization's focus and people like Ben Bradlee insisted on quality journalism, even if it took awhile. 


Although Shields and Brooks don't mention it, I have a real problem when "Twit readers" demand that Brian Williams, the 'talking head' that reads/introduces the 22 minutes of news every night be 'credible', far beyond any of the people (mostly anonymous) whose barely literate Twits they eagerly consume around the clock. 


Anyway, back to another excellent discussion between Shields and Brooks: