It warn't no crescent moon!

At the beginning of the week, I wrote about the moon. It struck me yesterday that I got one detail wrong, horrifically wrong for someone who professes to know something about things that fly around in the sky:

when I gazed down at the dark water in the rain barrel outside, I saw the thin crescent moon reflected there

Read that again and picture the scene. It was night. It was dark. The water in the rain barrel was blacker that the sky above. I stood over that black water and looked down. Reflected in the black water, I saw the moon.

I said I saw the thin crescent moon, but think about it. The moon was directly overhead. The sky was black. So the sun had long since set. What's wrong with this picture?

David. When the moon is a thin crescent, that's because it's showing mostly its dark side. That in turn means that its light side is facing that other way which means that the thin crescent moon is almost in between the Earth and the sun. A thin crescent moon will always hover close to the sun, either in the dawn sky just before sunrise or in the early evening sky just after sunset.

David. There never is a thin crescent moon directly overhead when the sky is black! For shame.

doh!

2:15:52 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Political Reconstruction?

Bill Moyers interviews Jessica Tuchman Mathews:

[...] the problem is not that Arabs don't recognize the end point that they want to get to; the problem is getting from here to there [...] from an autocratic retrograde repressive government and the only public opposition, organized opposition being Islamist.

So what are we offering as the model for how to get from here to there? A U.S. invasion. Well, if you're sitting in Cairo or Algiers or Damascus, that does not look like a particularly attractive model.

[...] I find it hard to believe that anyone seriously thinks [...] that there is a way that this war could lead to, no matter how successful in its military phase, could result in a democratic transformation of the Middle East. I think that the sort of facts on the ground tell you that it's likely to be the opposite. [...]

right now the US plan is a plan for military occupation; it is not a plan for political reconstruction. It explicitly forbids, for example, the participation of political groups in Iraq

2:45:56 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

History Lessons

I never learned my history lessons well. The dates and the kings and the wars and the manifest truths never sunk in in any meaningful ways. And I never learned the "stories" of history.

Yet here and there, a few simple things stuck, not great profundities, rather mostly the stuff of victor-ideologies, but nevertheless even these periodically provide a "framework" for thought.

What did we all learn about post World War I Europe in our history classes? For heaven's sake, didn't we learn (if we learned anything) that it was the deprivation and humiliation of Germany that inevitably led to the rise of Adolf Hitler?

So here we are with a unilateralist cowboy and his salivating corporate henchmen [*] fanning those same flames and proclaiming the act to be in the interest of long term peace!

Didn't we all sit in class and learn that lesson!? Where were these guys then?

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[*] Is this pure polemic? I don't think so. It strikes me that (a) the rewards Cheney's Halliburton reaped from rebuilding after Cheney as Secretary of Defense defeated Iraq, (b) the rewards Rumsfeld's ABB reaped in selling nuclear technology to the North Koreans, and (c) the rewards that Perle's Trireme Partners stands to gain by investing in homeland security in an era of brutal war, perpetual hostility, rejuvenated hatred and the coming boom in terrorist recruiting ... it strikes me that these rewards qualify these men as corporate henchmen. Perhaps I exceed the bounds of discretion when I insert "salivating," but I bet they did and do.

2:03:33 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []