Category — Observations

Fecundity. Now there’s an SAT word for you.

I haven’t thought of that word in years, yet it came to mind this morning as I was driving my daily 32 mile (one way) commute through the desert into Tucson. I do admit the reason the word came to mind is a bit strange, and to me, sad.

I have been driving the high desert for five years now and this time of year is usually a bit wet. It is called “monsoon season,” a silly phrase which is a perfect example of exaggeration and bluster brought on by weeks of extremely high temperatures.  In any case, I’ve been seeing the remains of rabbits on the roads. They apparently didn’t fare well when encountering vehicles. There seems to be more furry bodies than usual. I assume the rain increases rabbit food supplies and thus the result is rabbit fecundity. A plethora of rabbits results in some not making it across the busy, dangerous roads. Hopping and stopping on roads is not a safe practice for the critters. Yet it must be built into their DNA.

Now there’s a random thought for the day in a round about way.

I was reading INC magazine on my flight from Orlando to Tucson today and enjoyed an article about a New Mexico company that sells room-sized nuclear reactors. That’s not what this post is about. The article got me thinking about small nuclear weapons, for whatever reason. The brain hath its own reasons.

So, on this mind riff I thought of the following scenario. Any country that wants to cripple  western civilization, or civilization in general, can do so with a single nuclear weapon and a delivery system to fire it not at some land target, like New York, London, Paris or Moscow, but straight up.

The  EMP (eloctromagnetic pulse) from the resulting blast in space would likely knock out all military, government and commercial communication satellites in the hemisphere.

No GPS. No Direct TV. No weather pics from space. No spy satellites.

OMG, Foursquare would be out of business, not to mention the rest of us.

Hey, just another fun thought to add to our wonderful Age of Anxiety.

PS Question: Today, would an above ground 11 megaton nuclear blast, like those done in the 50′s, knock out satellites via EMP?  No satellites to worry about back then. Could be another reason we went to underground testing in the 60′s… and I thought it was an environmental issue.

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How many people know a cultural reference when they see one? How many just skip over it, if they do not recognize it?

Here’s an excerpt from an article in the NYT today about former Sen. John Edwards:

“For instance, after Mr. Young finagled a way to explain Ms. Hunter’s presence in Mr. Edwards’s hotel room in Florida and get her out of there unnoticed, he says, Mr. Edwards just looked at him blankly and said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Rielle wasn’t in Florida.” What was this: “Gaslight”? A trip to the Twilight Zone? An exercise in lawyerly deniability, to which Mr. Edwards apparently often resorted? A conversation being secretly recorded? Or something even scarier?”

Catch the “Gaslight” reference? Good for you if you did.

Go ahead, if you need to, look it up on Wikipedia.org or IMDB.com. Have fun. Sorry if you didn’t ‘get it.’   Ever heard of “Closing of the American Mind?” Good reading. Many thanks to Allan Bloom.

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Let me quote from a speech that Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary (and now the Obama administration’s top economist), gave in 1999. “If you ask why the American financial system succeeds,” he said, “at least my reading of the history would be that there is no innovation more important than that of generally accepted accounting principles: it means that every investor gets to see information presented on a comparable basis; that there is discipline on company managements in the way they report and monitor their activities.” And he went on to declare that there is “an ongoing process that really is what makes our capital market work and work as stably as it does.”

Originally in: Krugman, NYT

My only comment: Oops.

My wife Cheryl and I ate at Pei Wei yesterday at Casas Adobes never expecting to witness child cruelty.

We sat near the cash register in a booth with a high back. A mother with two small children and a female teenager entered the restaurant and approched the order counter. The teenager took one of the children and placed the child on the back of the booth we were sitting at.

I heard the mother say something like, “That is not a wise decision. That is a lousy decision. Go stand in the corner.”

At first I thought the mother was speaking to the small child. Next, I see the teenage girl walking, zombie-like,  to a corner adjacent to the restaurant entrance turning her back to the restaurant with her face deep in the corner.

I rolled my eyes and tilted my head in the direction of the girl so that Cheryl could see this weird, Dickensian punishment that was occuring in public.

How humiliating for a person that age! Of any age.

After completing her lunch order,  the mother turned to the teenager, who was about 30 feet away, and spoke in a quiet voice, “You can come back now,” and the girl returned to the family. How the girl was able to hear her mother’s words over the din of the crowd was a bit creepy. Then again, the whole scene was creepy. The girl’s hearing was obviously acutely tuned to the frequency of mommy dearest.

I don’t know, but I think someone in that family needs a psych evaluation.

When Cheryl and I finished our meal and were exiting the restaurant, my mind flashed to a scene in the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise is about to be captured by the mind police and the pre-cog warns him of impending danger.

I wanted to walk over to the teenage girl and shout, like the pre-cog, … “Run. RUN ! “