I'm packing my bag for another TDY, this time to a destination with low Internet availability, so I expect to be out of the net for the next week.
The outbound portion of this trip will be reasonably comfortable, since I'll be in business class almost all the way, but the return trip will include a 15-hour economy class flight (ouch!). I'm just hoping United Airlines will - please, in the name of God and everything holy - let me trade frequent flyer miles for an upgrade on that flight.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
Middle-Aged Professor Arrested for Long-Ago Terrorist Bombing
No, not Bill Ayers, it was this other university instructor in Canada. The French want to put him on trial for his participation in a 1980 attack on a Paris synagogue.
The academic life must hold great appeal for left-wing bomb tossers, since so many become professors in their old age. In addition to Ayers and his lovely wife Bernardine Dohrn, I can think of: Mark Rudd (another Weather Underground colleague of Ayers who now teaches at a junior college in New Mexico), Susan Rosenberg (convicted for possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives and a stockpile of illicit weapons, pardoned by President Clinton, hired by New York's Hamilton College), Sami al-Arian (who pled guilty to conspiracy to assist the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement while a professor at the University of South Florida) and, over in Greece, Alexandros Giotopoulos (the economics professor who headed the Marxist terrorist group 17 November).
What wonderful memories they must have. I'd love to be in the faculty room sometime when they reminisce about the good old days.
The academic life must hold great appeal for left-wing bomb tossers, since so many become professors in their old age. In addition to Ayers and his lovely wife Bernardine Dohrn, I can think of: Mark Rudd (another Weather Underground colleague of Ayers who now teaches at a junior college in New Mexico), Susan Rosenberg (convicted for possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives and a stockpile of illicit weapons, pardoned by President Clinton, hired by New York's Hamilton College), Sami al-Arian (who pled guilty to conspiracy to assist the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement while a professor at the University of South Florida) and, over in Greece, Alexandros Giotopoulos (the economics professor who headed the Marxist terrorist group 17 November).
What wonderful memories they must have. I'd love to be in the faculty room sometime when they reminisce about the good old days.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Best Bumper Sticker I Saw on Veterans Day
The best I've seen in months, actually. It's the new Navy slogan: "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of All Who Threaten It."
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Veterans Day, and the Reconciliation of Former Enemies
On this Veterans Day morning I attended a brief ceremony in the cemetery of my local church in Annandale, Virgina. American Legion Post 1776 of Annandale placed American flags on the grave sites of the twenty-five veterans who are buried in the church yard. Afterwards, I read the headstones on those graves and noted that most of the men had served in the Second World War, a few in the Great War or the Spanish-American War, and three in the Civil War. Among the Civil War veterans was one Elhanah W. Wakefield, a First Sergent in the 2nd Massachusetts from 1863 to 1865, who has a special connection to that Annandale church.
In 1864, when Union troops around Alexandria, Virginia, were being raided and harassed by Confederate partisans under John Singleton Mosby ("the Grey Ghost"), First Sergent Wakefield was ordered to burn down the Annandale Chapel, and he did so. The reason for the order is no longer known, but possibly it was in reprisal for assistance given to Mosby's men by local residents. One year later the war was over, and Wakefield choose to be mustered out of the Army in Alexandria, where he married a local woman. He then helped to re-build the Annandale Chapel, and later became its Sunday School superintendent. He eventually became an ordained minister and started another chapel nearby (today known as the Wakefield Chapel, and a Fairfax County historic site). When Wakefield died in 1920, he was buried a few feet from the Annandale Chapel he had restored, which still stands and is in use on Colombia Pike.
A fuller account of Wakefield's story can be found here, based on contemporary sources from around the time of his death.
J.S. Mosby also had a sort of reconciliation with his old enemies, but not until one hundred and ten years after the war. When the U.S. Army built a training center for reservists at Fort Belvoir in Mosby's old stomping grounds of northern Virginia, it was dedicated as the John Singleton Mosby United States Army Reserve Center. When I was in a Reserve unit and attended drills there, it always tickled me that the place was named in honor of a man the U.S. Army would once have hanged if only it had been able to catch him.
In 1864, when Union troops around Alexandria, Virginia, were being raided and harassed by Confederate partisans under John Singleton Mosby ("the Grey Ghost"), First Sergent Wakefield was ordered to burn down the Annandale Chapel, and he did so. The reason for the order is no longer known, but possibly it was in reprisal for assistance given to Mosby's men by local residents. One year later the war was over, and Wakefield choose to be mustered out of the Army in Alexandria, where he married a local woman. He then helped to re-build the Annandale Chapel, and later became its Sunday School superintendent. He eventually became an ordained minister and started another chapel nearby (today known as the Wakefield Chapel, and a Fairfax County historic site). When Wakefield died in 1920, he was buried a few feet from the Annandale Chapel he had restored, which still stands and is in use on Colombia Pike.
A fuller account of Wakefield's story can be found here, based on contemporary sources from around the time of his death.
J.S. Mosby also had a sort of reconciliation with his old enemies, but not until one hundred and ten years after the war. When the U.S. Army built a training center for reservists at Fort Belvoir in Mosby's old stomping grounds of northern Virginia, it was dedicated as the John Singleton Mosby United States Army Reserve Center. When I was in a Reserve unit and attended drills there, it always tickled me that the place was named in honor of a man the U.S. Army would once have hanged if only it had been able to catch him.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
National Voting Pattern Mostly Unchanged in 2008
These state-by-state scatterplots show the regional distribution of the Obama vote in 2008 versus the Kerry vote in 2004, and the Kerry vote versus the Gore vote in 2000. The states above (left of) the 45-degree diagonal line are those that went Democratic. The plots look pretty similar, huh? To be precise, the standard deviation between 2008-2004 was 3%, and the 2004-2000 SD was only 2.4%, so the electoral map has not changed much since 2000 apart from the obvious outlier of Hawaii (favorite son effect).
The plots come from a blog called Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, which is written by a group of professors in political science and statistics departments. They have highly satisfying stuff if you like your election analysis quantified and on the dry side.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Poll of Feds Finds 51% Support McCain
From the 'For What it's Worth' Department
A private newsletter for Federal employees (Fedsmith.com) polled its readers on the eve of the election and found they favor McCain over Obama, 51% to 46%. Here's the story: Is The Presidential Election Close? Very Close According to Latest (and Last) Survey Before the Election .
A private newsletter for Federal employees (Fedsmith.com) polled its readers on the eve of the election and found they favor McCain over Obama, 51% to 46%. Here's the story: Is The Presidential Election Close? Very Close According to Latest (and Last) Survey Before the Election .
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