The AP reported today that Starbucks has launched a line of instant coffee. Instant coffee? Starbucks? WTF? You guys spent the last twenty years convincing all of us to spend the better part of $5 on a cup of coffee… and now you want to turn my caffeine addled thoughts to the type of “coffee” my grandmother kept in the back of a cabinet to fix when guests not civilized enough to drink tea came to visit? I know your fancy TV ads are going to tell me that it’s OK because the Europeans do it, but you know what? It’s not OK, Starbucks. Coffee should be brewed! It’s not that I’m against gaining efficiencies… I mean, that’s sort of what I do, but some things are sacrosanct. So what I’m going to need you to do is keep brewing real coffee. While you’re doing that, I’ll stay busy doing the things I’m good at and when the time comes, I will exchange American dollars for fresh brewed coffee… and if I want a cup of instant, I’ll reach to the back of the cabinet and pull out the 10 year old jar of Folgers.

The Senate has accepted that a public healthcare option is unreachable. Polling has increasingly shown that it’s not popular among the majority of respondents. And a president is at risk of demolishing his entire term and burying the possibility of reelection for daring to press on against the rising tide of opposition. Some of my friends on the extreme left would call that heroic. I call it just plain dumb. Politics, they say, is the art of the possible. It’s about constantly seeking out a coalition of 50% of the population plus one person. It’s a simple matter of math and right now, Mr. President, you don’t have the votes. You don’t have the popular support. And you don’t have the political good-will left to twist arms in Congress.

With that said, the president does have an opportunity, here. He has the opportunity to get the 70 or 80% solution. He has the opportunity to do what really great politicians have made their careers doing – Compromise. Insisting that reform must be all one thing or all the other is a sure recipe for failure. Follow the example of Speaker O’Neill and President Reagan on taxes in the early 80s. If the study of politics teaches us anything it’s that nothing good lies down the road of absolutism. Right now, both parties have the ability to walk away with something approximating a win. Wait too long and the moment passes… And then a pox on both your houses.

OK, the duly elected and sworn President of the United States wants to give a short speech to students about the value of education and hard work; controversial topics, to be sure. I’m not sure I’m feeling the outrage, though. Whether you love him, hate him, or are totally indifferent towards him, the guy is the president. I don’t see the impending harm of allowing students to watch and listen to the leader of the free world talking about issues that will impact them. Has the fabric of our civic discourse become so brittle that even hearing a view that differs from our own risks destroying our individual political beliefs? Are we so incapable of building a rational argument to support our point of view that the highest form of argument we’re capable of is throwing a five-year old’s tantrum and whining, “I’m not listening?”

For those who are keeping their kids at home that day, think about the message you are sending to your children. You’re saying that your own views are so weakly held that they won’t stand up to scrutiny or discussion. You’re saying that it’s better to tune out altogether than to engage in the discussion at all. If you truly believe that a 30-minute speech by a politician will undo the 16 or 17 years of influence you have had on your kids, then honestly, I feel bad for you. Living with that kind of insecurity must be tough. If you want to do right by your kids, encourage them to join the fray, to discuss, to develop and refine their own opinions, to ask the hard questions and seek the difficult truths. If you’re afraid of doing that, then lord, I don’t even want to know you.

I’ve been trolling around the internet for the last few minutes and was struck by an article stating that the global population will reach 7 billion in about two years. That’s seven billion, with a “B.” It seems to me that the general consensus is that, really, the planet was basically full two or so billion people ago. If you really want to do something to save the planet, slow down with the procreating. Seriously, you know what causes that, right? I’m looking at you here third world. Yeah. I’m telling you to lay off the scrumping until you have the infrastructure and food to manage more people wandering around your countries looking for work or food or magic beans or whatever it is people look for in your country.

And just in case you think this is only going to be a rant about the poor developing nations, let me put my right wing friends on notice too: I’m not letting you off the hook for this. If you want foreign aid that might help some of these countries that are being overwhelmed by poverty and disease and generally being the ones most responsible for adding to the world’s population, tell your member of Congress that you’re in favor of packing up a few pallets of condoms and sending them overseas. In terms that we understand best, the bottom line is that there are a finite number of resources to go around. The more people there are on the planet, the smaller the sliver of the pie will be for all of us… So lets do our patriotic duty and get on board with some social engineering!

Come on, surely I’m not the only one out of slightly less than 7 billion who thinks exponentially larger populations are a bad idea.

Forty years on, the Apollo Program is no less fantastic than it was on this date in 1969, perhaps it is made more so because it has never been replicated. We’ve spent the better part of the last 35 years frittering away the wonder and fire of those heady days of early space travel, when astronauts were hailed as American heroes rather than thought of as managers of an orbiting science fair.

There are those who, in the coming months and years, will say that the cost and dangers of human spaceflight are too high; that there are good works that need doing here on earth or that leading an effort to send man into space is a frivolous exercise with no practical outcomes. Those were the arguments too when Europeans set out to discover new trade routes to the Indies. The same arguments could have just as easily been made when the precursors of human life crawled out of the primordial ooze… It was warm, cozy, safe, and familiar. Staying put would have been the easy alternative. But that’s not what we did as a culture. History is the uninterrupted upward ark of human progress. We crawled out of the ooze, we crossed the ocean, and we went to the moon because those were the next logical steps in the evolution of civilization. And the step after that is to once again send the sons and daughters of the planet earth out into space to explore Mars and eventually beyond.

I hope above all else that my generation has the fortitude of our fathers and grandfathers to carry through the tragedies and triumphs and carry our flag back to the moon and to worlds beyond. Today we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Apollo XI, turn our eyes skyward, and wonder.