Best Decision I Ever Made

I have made countless decisions in my life and my work, some of them big and many of them small. Some of those decisions turned out well, others not so well. But one of those choices stands out heads above the rest.

Twenty years ago this week, I fell in love with my best friend. The emotion and experience caught me off guard at the time, but set the stage for a relationship that in so many ways has helped shape who I am and what I am meant to be. That the Lord brought us together in marriage is a marvel and a joy that still stands so many years later.

She is my best friend, mother to my children, my partner in faith and in life, and in so many ways completes and balances me. We have been together now for half of my life, and I have the better end of the deal.

I'm not usually into marquee proposals or valentine billboards, and in some ways this blog post might be construed as such. But every now and then, something more than a private, personal declaration is warranted.

Twenty years, and we've barely scratched the surface of our future. I can't wait to see what's in store.

All my love is yours, Janet. The next Taco Bell meal is on me.

Asthmatic Rant - The Idiotic Regulation of Inhalers

This actually all started a few years ago, when the environmental lobby successfully convinced Washington that all forms of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are horribly, terribly bad for the atmosphere and the environment. CFCs, a common propellant that was used in aerosol based spray products, are supposedly a danger to the Earth's ozone layer. Mind you, if all the people of the world stood outside and sprayed every can of every sort up into the air, it would never rise high enough into the atmosphere to ever even dent the ozone layer. I will allow that potentially, of course, if vast amounts of CFCs were injected high enough, perhaps some minor degradation could occur (based on the chemistry and science only tested in a laboratory environment). At any rate, the FDA decided that not only are aerosol cans a dire threat to our world, but small, compact CFC based asthma inhalers are too.

I am an asthmatic. Have been since I was 10 years old. I have had prescription-only, fast-acting inhalers by my side ever since. Fortunately with age, my asthma has eased to primarily a seasonal nuisance, but I still never go anywhere without an inhaler. For the past few years, I've had to use an "environmentally safe" inhaler that costs more and doesn't work nearly as well (it takes more puffs to get sufficient medicine into my lungs). Tell me, can anyone seriously or honestly believe that any puff I take out of a CFC based inhaler is 1) going to end up in the atmosphere instead of my lungs, or 2) that there's enough of it that might escape high enough to do any sort of measurable damage to the environment? Horse-puckey. I don't buy it. At all.

It's too late now, of course. I suppose we ought to be glad they didn't ban inhalers entirely. The environmentalists have won this battle, and the pharmaceuticals are either just passing down the cost of increased regulation to the patient or increasing their profit. I don't know which, and I don't care.

To the environmentalists: Stay out of my medicine cabinet and let me breathe.

Boatlift - Manhattan 9/11

A fellow member over at Ricochet posted this today, a powerful and moving story that you may have never heard - the boatlift evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11. There are many untold stories of that fateful day, but this one deserves to be spread far and wide.


(h/t: Aaron Miller)

Look Out Above

2011 has certainly been anything but uneventful. We've had record snowfall and tornados. We've had hurricanes and floods. We've had earthquakes and wildfires. Now, the sky is falling:

NASA space junk experts have refined the forecast for the anticipated death plunge of a giant satellite, with the U.S. space agency now predicting the 6 1/2-ton climate probe will plummet to Earth around Sept. 23, a day earlier than previously reported.

The defunct bus-size spacecraft is NASA's Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS), which launched in 1991 and was shut down in 2005 after completing its mission. The satellite was expected to fall to Earth sometime this year, with experts initially pegging a weeks-long window between late September and early October, then narrowing it to the last week of this month.

While NASA expects much of it to disintegrate upon re-entry, as many as 26 large pieces are expected to survive and make impact with the surface of the planet. With any luck, the satellite formerly known as UARS will fall into the ocean. However, there is a 1-in-3200 chance of debris hitting a person on the ground. And although experts assure us that these are "extremely remote" odds, it would be nice if there were just a few more zeros at the end of that 3200 number. As a point of fact however, when Skylab fell in 1979, the odds of it hitting anyone was 1-in-152. NASA and JSOC (Joint Space Operations Center) won't know for sure where until just 2 hours before reentry.

So while you are going about your week, worrying about the economy, the Middle East, or the performance of your favorite college football team, you might want to look out above.

10 Years Later

Remarkably, I'm not sure I have much to say on this 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that brought down the World Trade Center in New York and tore a hole in the side of the Pentagon. Retrospective pieces abound both on the internet and on TV, but I have mostly chosen to steer away from many of these. However, I did watch the National Geographic special on 9/11, in particular the interview of President George W. Bush on his recollection of that fateful day.

A few items did catch my attention, though, including this article in the Washington Post about a couple of F-16 pilots sent off to stop United 93 - on unarmed planes. The most interesting find to me was the release of recently declassified audio associated with a Rutgers Law Review study that recreated and analyzed the operational facts of the FAA and NORAD response to the attacks. From the preface:

Team 8 of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has determined the operational facts of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) and North American Aerospace Defense Command’s (NORAD) response to [the] September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as reconstructed from primary sources such as logs, tape recordings, transcripts and radar data, and corroborated in interviews with key personnel involved. Set forth in this monograph is the definitive account concerning when and how the FAA gained situational awareness that each of the four commercial aircraft was hijacked by terrorists on the morning of 9/11, when and how the FAA notified the military about each of the hijacked aircraft, and when and how the military responded.

From a historical standpoint, I found the report and the audio extremely informative, and more than enough to bring back the chaos and uncertainty of that morning - a dynamic that quite a few of these 10th anniversary retrospectives seem to gloss over. From an emotional standpoint, well, we'll just leave that there for now.

In memory of those we lost, in honor of those who responded, and in gratitude to those who serve on the front lines today I simply say: God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

Classic Reagan

Ok, I suppose I ought to offer a mea culpa for this, especially after my post yesterday on civility in political discourse. But the truth is, I have a low tolerance for hecklers who claim to stand on First Amendment rights for the purpose of disrupting orderly presentations, speeches and forums. Hecklers by definition are anti-civil in both motive and method. For whatever reason, they are often tolerated today until removed by security.

Perhaps that is the reason that I find the clip below so refreshing and hilarious at the same time. I imagine only Reagan could get away with this of course. But it echoes my sentiments exactly.


(h/t: Claire Berlinksi, Ricochet)

Civility Doesn't Sell

Try as I might, I just cannot bring myself to focus my limited time and mental facilities to blogging about politics. I first seriously began paying attention to the machinations of our governing class in 1991, largely because the 1992 presidential cycle represented my first opportunity to vote (I was only 17 in the 1988 cycle). For the last two decades, I've grown up some and learned that many in the political class are nowhere near as honorable as the institution they purport to serve. I am first a fiscal conservative, laced with a strong proclivity toward social conservatism that is yet limited by a streak of libertarian thought. I pledge allegiance to no party, although my leanings are pretty obvious.

The headlines are filled with economic, political and social drama - much of it manufactured to maintain the information industry that has grown exponentially these last 20 years. Buried underneath this noise are real issues, real crises that are lost in the over-the-top outrageous outrage being perpetrated by those both in front and behind the cameras. There are no rules being followed in our national discourse. The age of civility, if there was ever truly such a thing, no longer exists. Extreme language and metaphor is now the norm. Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. calls for an army of union workers to go to war against the Tea Party, and gets a presidential pass for it. A one-time Republican candidate uses a hunting metaphor and gets the party raked over the coals for weeks and is accused of promoting political violence. And they all by and large get a pass from the general public, because among the masses, the rhetoric is just as extreme - just look at any message board, or comments below online articles.

This phenomenon is not limited to politics. You find it in the entertainment industry, major sports, and shockingly even in some religious circles. Fans and participants alike have all been conditioned to accept the use of such extreme rhetoric, and to expect it. Civil and polite discourse is ignored, perhaps because the tone and vocabulary used fails to cut through the cacophony of rage, malice and bile. Sometimes I can only shake my head and wonder. The Vandals aren't at the gate; they are already among us - and I fear that in many cases, they are us.

I'd like to believe that there is hope that we can rescue ourselves from further depravity and baseness. Yet as I look out upon the landscape of our society, with my limited view and even more limited understanding, it is hard to see people lifting themselves out of the mosh pit of rhetorical decadence. The information and entertainment industries have no interest in slowing the trend either, for one obvious reason.

In the 21st century America, civility doesn't sell.