This is rich. One of the Thousands Standing Around who do security theater in airports says that they need a raise.
People tend to take our jobs for granted. You’re more likely to hear about long wait times or annoyance about taking off your shoes than you are about the important work we do. What you don’t hear about are the weapons we confiscate, the threats of violence we deal with, and the grueling work hours we endure in order to keep America’s skies safe.
Actually, we hear a lot about the weapons you don’t confiscate, and the snow-globes you do. And when we want to know, how, exactly, strip-searching grandma and three-year olds keeps our skies safe, you say you can’t tell us because Terrorists are watching.
What’s up with this bitching about a raise, anyway? Is it throwing out a high bid so we can negotiate back down to where we are now, instead of cutting your pay and eliminating headcount like you need? Because, as employees in a public union, you need a pay cut and worse hours.
Until 2011, our union even lacked the right to bargain over workplace conditions. While some bargaining rights were granted, we still lack many of the same rights that most federal workers are entitled to.
Organizing labor against the Federal Government is (by definition) organizing against the representatives of the people. It should be illegal. And a strike should be given the same treatment that Reagan gave PATCO.
But if I was in charge, the first thing I’d do would be to dismantle the deep state. The agency I’d start with would be the DHS, and I’d use the TSA as poster children. But if people aren’t willing to embrace my proposal, let’s at least let Elon Musk take over running it. Deadwood like this complainer would be the first ones out the door.
Watching speeches by the new president reminds me so much of Star Trek (the Original Series). Specifically this episode:
Note: I am not not NOT saying that anyone in the administration, much less the president, espouses the tenets of nationalism-socialism. (“Say what you will about them, but at least it’s an ethos.”) If you’d seen the episode, you’d know that. And if you haven’t seen it, maybe you should before you make inferences.
(I wonder if that episode could be aired today. The iconography seems so triggering by modern standards.)
I don’t think what Trump said was a high crime or misdemeanor. But I do wish he would leave office. In fact, I wish he would leave office, and then Mike Pence would also leave office. I’d like Nancy Pelosi to take over the presidency, per the constitution, and run out the clock on the 2016-2020 term. It would give her a historic first (female president).
John F. Kennedy was elected after a campaign critical of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration’s “Missile Gap,” aided by a friendly press and voting irregularities in Chicago. As it turned out, the gap was illusory, but his campaign required Kennedy to govern as a cold war hawk. The Bay of Pigs invasion was followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis. The situation in Viet Nam also worsened, especially after the CIA-sponsored coup against Diem.
Way back in 1957, then-President Eisenhower had federalized the National Guard to enforce court-ordered desegregation in Arkansas. But Kennedy, perhaps because he owed his victory in part to pro-segregation southern Democrats, was slow to enforce the law. Not until the middle of Kennedy’s third year in office did his administration move to a stronger pro-Civil Rights position.
This bothers me: if people can test negative and then go into quarantine for 8 days, and only then test positive, that argues for continued extreme social distancing until better treatment and/or a vaccine is developed.
But this also bothers me. If even the left (albeit the British left) can see the problems that accrue from continued lockdown—which accrue primarily to those at the bottom of the ladder, then what should we do?
And there’s this from Nassim Taleb. I can live with a society where people wear masks whenever they think they might be sick, or that a substantial fraction of the people they encounter might be sick.
It would be nice, too, if we had some level of widespread agreement on what we’re trying to accomplish, and what can be allowed to supercede it.
However, there is one inconvenient truth that cannot be disputed: more black Americans have been killed by three months of coronavirus than the number who have been killed by cops and vigilantes since the turn of the millennium.
The second book in this very occasional series is … well, any of Heinlein’s juveniles. The cover is from the final book in the series, Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958). It features bug-eyed monsters, space pirates, and a plucky hero who saves the earth from alien invaders over Labor Day weekend and still makes it back in time to get a free-ride scholarship at M.I.T. and throw a milkshake at the antagonist. Plus, we are taught a handy mnemonic for the order of the nine planets (see below) and a parable about frogs that isn’t the one about boiling them slowly. (Sorry for all the spoilers, but you’ve had 62 years.)
For this posting of my #2 fiction book, I could have picked any one of the series. They’re all great (except, I guess, Rocket Ship Galileo, the first). I mean, they were great when I first read them, starting in junior high school, when the science was only a little bit dated. (Venus had turned out not to have swamps, for example, and Mars never had canals. Jupiter’s EM environment would probably make Ganymede a poor place to farm.) Starting in 1953, after a few books set in our solar system, Heinlein got wise and set his stories somewhere more romantic.
But despite that, the juveniles are still great. Honestly, they’re better than most of Heinlein’s non-YA fiction. Practically all of it. Especially if you see Starship Troopers as the YA fiction that it ought to have been.
What are you waiting for? Get started! For a complete list, see the wikipedia article (search “heinlein juvenile”). But you’ll need to get them new. We never put the old ones back into circulation.
I’ve been challenged by a friend on one of the walled garden social media sites to list seven (?) books so that identity thieves can get started figuring out the answers to my security questions. Maybe he’s getting a cut of the take. But I’m too loyal a friend to respond with utter fabrications. The books I list here will be 100% truthful. Trust me.
I’m not sure I understand what the rules for this game are, so (for the first seven books at least) I’ll only post works of fiction.
Number one is obvious. Like, nothing-else-comes-close obvious. To wit, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Naturally, no sooner did Kevin challenge me to this dumb contest than he stole my thunder, or tried to. Notice, however, that my cover is from a significantly older edition than his. I have an even older one (below), but I don’t read it, to protect the spine. I also have the hardcover, and the Audible book, and Kindle. I even have a PDF of Tim Minear’s script for a movie adaptation.
paperback, harcover, Audible, and Kindle editions.
I first read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in 9th grade. I almost didn’t. At first, I only read a couple of pages, because the protagonist narrates the book in some kind of weird more-or-less Russian. (Imagine if Lt. Chekov were to dictate all the Captain’s Log entries on Star Trek.) Reading that was work, and I’m opposed to doing that, so I nearly gave up. But my friend Daniel Henderson, who’d already read it, convinced me to make the effort, so I #persisted. And it was worth it.
In P.E., we were playing baseball, so Daniel and I would take positions way out in the outfield and talk about the book. Periodically one of the jocks in class would yell at us that a ball was headed toward the outfield and we’d have to stop and deal with the ball before going back to talking. I remember doing a book report on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in an English class that year. I don’t remember how the teacher responded, but my grades that semester were 4 C’s and 2 D’s, so it must not have impressed my teacher.
By the time I got to college—which I did, eventually, despite a less than stellar 9th grade GPA—I had probably read it 20 times. I could hand the book to someone and ask them to open it at random and read a sentence, and I would respond with the next one. It’s that good. And I’m that much of a geek.
The technological details haven’t aged well, although they did influence my career. Long before I studied computer science, I had become skeptical of monolithic systems design; a natural alternative for me was the Unix philosophy of small sharp tools, and, later, distributed systems. But Heinlein was usually wrong about the science fiction. (To use Peter Thiel’s language, he was usually too bullish about atoms and, if not bearish then insufficiently bullish, about bits.)
What Heinlein got right was the politics. (I don’t want to spoil it, but TMIAHM is not, despite what you may have heard, or read on the cover of the hardcover edition above, the story of people who set up a libertarian paradise on the moon. Quite the contrary, they destroy one. Because it had to be done. Sigh.)
But Heinlein also raises non-political questions. I’ll mention just two. First, what is a marriage? What constitutes one, what is its purpose, and what support ought society give it? Second, what is a soul? Can an artificial intelligence be alive? If it did, would it have rights? Could it be noble?
If you don’t like this book then, sorry, we just can’t be friends. Have a nice life.
