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Showing posts from October 25, 2009

Gravity.

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One day you're up, the next you're down. As true in outer space as it is back on terra firma. Take it from one who knows. (Or from Juan, who knows... because he knows, too.) Just found our way over to Kaztropharius 137b in hopes of finding some Big Green fans. (Seems like that quest takes us farther and farther with each passing year.) Not a lot of love to be had in the Great Magellanic Cloud, but the Kaztropharians are reasonably congenial ... if a bit super-sized. Jesus christmas, what an enormous crowd of revelers we had that first night! It was like being in the outer-space version of Gulliver's Travels, not the Lilliput journey but that other one. (No, not the horse people. The other, other one... with the big people.) While giants tend to make me a little nervous, most of my colleagues seemed unperturbed. Mitch Macaphee just worked on various science projects, off in a corner some where. The man-sized tuber practiced his saxophone backstage - a bit distracting, bu

War and peace.

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A lot of explosions are taking place in the imperial hinterlands these days. No matter how optimistic you might be, it's a little hard to convince oneself that things are moving in anything like a positive direction. Of course, we live in an era when people point to Iraq as if it were some kind of success story. The truth is, that country is simply blowing up a bit more slowly than it was a couple of years ago. I suppose you could say that the success of counterinsurgency strategy was to help bring a full-scale fratricidal war down to 2003-04 levels of killing. That is a bit like an arsonist taking credit for helping to put out a house fire he himself started - one that resulted in multiple fatalities. (Note to our "leaders": Don't expect a good citizenship award any time soon... aside from the Nobel prize.) I must admit, I find the "the surge worked" crowd more than a little nauseating - most of them were in favor of this disastrous war in the first place.