Tag Archives: bomb

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. National contrition. I had the great fortune to meet Brigadier General Paul Tibbets (retired) not many years before his death in 2007. He was speaking at the aviation museum in Richmond, Virginia that ended with a question and answer session. The first, inevitable, question – one that was probably posed to him every day since 1945 – was if he had any regrets about commanding the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His response, a single word, “No.” That’s sort of how I feel when I read articles telling me that we should apologize for dropping the bomb on Japan. America didn’t start the damned war, got sucker punched to bring us into it, and then the apologists want us to feel bad that to end it the full force and power of the American military came crashing down on the country that was then our enemy. Our job in August 1945 was to win the war with as few additional American casualties as possible. That’s what we did. So, no, I won’t apologize for that. Not now. Not ever.

2. Ten candidates. Later this evening the “top ten” Republican presidential candidates will engaged in what passes for a contemporary debate in this country. They’ll each have 3-5 minutes to pull off a sound bite they can use in their campaign material, but there won’t be time for a discussion of substance. There are lots of familiar faces from elections past going on stage tonight, but there is damned little sign of new blood in the arena. Most of the contenders couldn’t make it to the big game the last 2 or 3 times they tried. I’m not sure I see where much has changed. I don’t expect any of these ten to speak to my peculiar combination of important issues. Then again, I don’t expect anyone from either party to do that. Before this debate even gets started I’m already thinking that the best outcome from it would be for me to go to bed on time and at least try to get a good night’s sleep. That would be far more beneficial than anything we’re likely to hear on television tonight.

3. Cooking. I was away last weekend. I haven’t had a chance to get to the market this week to pick up more than the requisite salad for my tortoise and creamer for me. Being away also meant that I wasn’t able to do most of the week’s heavy cooking on Sunday afternoon. Which is how you end up needing to fiddle around the kitchen making a passable meal and not sitting down to eat until Wednesday night until after 7PM. That might be fine for you continental types who keep late hours, but for me on an average weeknight seven o’clock is closing in on the middle of the damned night. Maybe it’s just an artifact from childhood, but at my house 5PM is dinner time. Most weeknights I don’t quite make it, but I’m not usually far off – but then again I’m usually not coming up with something from scratch. So yes, currently as much as I usually enjoy it, I’m sick to death of cooking and the butterfly effect it’s having on the rest of the evening. I guess I should have grown up to have a job with a personal staff. More poor decision making on my part.

The nightmare scenario…

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Here in ‘Murica, we have a tendency to think in terms of big disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemic flu, and briefcase nukes. Those are the kind of events that get big attention and the corresponding big dollars poured into planning what to do when one of those things happens. For years, the nightmare scenario has been a hurricane slamming into the Big Easy (been there, done that), a mid-west earthquake that cripples transportation across swath of the country from Chicago to Memphis, or a non-descript dirty bomb left at Union Station our outside the Smithsonian. Those are still the official nightmare scenarios, but they’re not my personal nightmare.

Compared to radiological bombs and the weather, my personal nightmare is decidedly low tech. It’s ten suicide bombers in ten separate cities walking into ten coffee shops at 8:30 in the morning of a random Tuesday and blowing themselves to hell. It’s the kind of improvised devices we saw in Boston – easy enough that just about anyone can manufacture one with stuff they already have around the house. It’s not the kind of terror that’s going to bring down entire buildings, but let them start going off in shopping malls and restaurants across downtown America, and watch how fast the public clamors for something, anything that ratchets down the body count. How long would it be before we nationally agree to be searched at any time for any reason or to having our cars inspected before being allowed into a parking garage or to give up any number of our essential freedoms?

Suicide bombs and improvised explosives have become a way of life in places like Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adopting a bunker mentality when you spend every day under threat is a perfectly natural response to those outside forces acting on you, but I don’t want that for America. I don’t want to live in a garrison town where I’ve traded a lot of personal freedom for a nominal amount of safety. That’s my real nightmare scenario and one that we can only avoid through eternal vigilance. That’s the price we’re going to have to pay – the price we’ve always paid – for liberty.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The dead zone. Although they swear it’s unintentional, the building where I work is essentially a giant Faraday cage. Outside in the parking lot, five solid bars of 3G coverage. Inside, at my desk, with my phone pressed against the glass, one bar of intermittent EDGE coverage. Sometimes. If all the atmospheric conditions are just right. I don’t want to sit at my desk playing Angry Birds all day, but it would at least be nice to know who called when the “you have a voicemail” alert manages to fight its way through to my phone. Mostly though, you just get to be surprised by the texts, emails, and voice messages that come rolling in whenever you happen to go outside. Maybe I should just set everything to roll over to my Google Voice account and really freak the IT security weenies out.

2. Forgetting the airbags. For the last two weeks, I’ve been mentally preparing myself to get the truck back on Friday. It’s not that the rental car is awful, but well, it’s not my truck and not being able to see anything further than the tail end of the car in front of me lacks a certain charm. I called Monday and everything was still on track for a Friday pickup. When I called to check in this afternoon, apparently there’s been a snag. A very sheepish office manager confessed that they had forgotten to include replacing my deployed airbags in the original repair estimate and had therefor not ordered them. I’m not a fancy big city auto body shop, but I think I would have noticed the big white deflated bits hanging out of the steering wheel and from under the dash. Maybe it’s just me though. The parts are ordered and the truck is allegedly back together now, so as soon as they get there hands on the airbags, we should be all set. As of a few hours ago, Tuesday is the new Friday.

3. Iran. Part of me is stunned and amazed that we’re going to fiddle around and wring our hands and wait just long enough for Iran to make their very own nuke. The other part of me then remembers that it’s a government operation and then all of me ceases to be surprised. Boy if you thought groups like the Taliban were dangerous before, just wait until their friends get the bomb. The world is going to change and while we had a chance to stop it or at least stand aside while someone else stopped it, we sat around fretting about convincing our enemies that stopping the madness was a good idea. A hundred years from now, the world is going to look back at this generation of “leaders” and collectively ask WTF, dude?