Obama's Speech

Thanks, KVPI.

That's all I can say at the moment.

What did they do? They took advantage of a slow news Labor Day to print, in full it appears, the text of the speech President Obama plans to deliver to school children (mine included, thanks to an open-minded school district) tomorrow.

The text is here. Please go read it. You'll see the radical ideas Obama is spreading to our young, impressionable children:

Teachers, inspire and push your students.

Parents, keep your kids on track. Make sure they do their homework and don't spend every waking hour in front of the TV or Xbox.

Students, show up. Do your work. Figure out what you want to do with your life. Then set goals to do it.

Government, set high standards and support teachers and principals.

I know, it sounds like Communism all over the place. Especially this excerpt:

No one's born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You're not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don't hit every note the first time you sing a song. You've got to practice. It's the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it's good enough to hand in.

Don't be afraid to ask questions. Don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don't know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust - a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor - and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you're struggling, even when you're discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you - don't ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough. It's about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It's the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So, not exactly the Apocalypse, is it?

Time of the Spud

We're still here at Uncharted, limping along a little bit as we wrestle with server issues. Until the issues are resolved -- and we hope they will be soon -- our updates are going to be a little sparse. Trust me, we've got enough material to update the site twice a month for at least a year, so there's no shortage of material. Right now, it's just a shortage of just about everything else.

So to entertain the troops, we've dusted off an oldie but a goodie: Shelley Spud Days, in which hapless folks play a tug-o-war over a huge pit of mashed potatoes and otherwise celebrate everything there is to know about the Idaho potato. Here's the story. Hope you enjoy it.

Faith

Scott Adams has inadvertently provided a very good illustration of faith in today's Dilbert comic strip. Though what Dilbert hopes to accomplish may seem a difficult thing, he has faith enough -- as evinced by his statement in the last panel -- to insist that the vaporous being he's encountered take the approval form.

Of course, cynic that he is, that's not how Adams would interpret his creation. And that's fine. I'll stick with what I like.

Oh. My. Gosh.

Some wingnut on one of our local news channel websites offered the following PDF as evidence that educators are being asked to "indoctrinate" students by having them listen to a speech by President Obama on Tuesday. Some of the shocking activities and questions include:

Why do you think the president wants to speak to you?

What can students do to help in our schools?

Why is it important that we listen to the president and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?

Students could record important parts of the speech where the president is asking them to do something. Students might think about the following:

• What specific job is he asking me to do?
• Is he asking anything of anyone else?
• Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?

Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals. Teachers would collect and redistribute these letters at an appropriate later date to enable students to monitor their progress.

Wow. Frightening stuff, I know. Haven forbid we encourage our kids to think about what they might tell the president, why it might be important to listen to our elected officials (Articles of Faith 12 comes to mind: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law."

The only thing worse than ignorance, I've heard, is the determination to remain ignorant.

MARS!

The folks at NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Arizona at Tucson have got a treat for space buffs (I typed "space butts" twice before I could get my finger on the "F" key): High-resolution photos of Mars. They're available in the public domain here. They're not necessarily Google Earth high-res, but they're the highest resolution images we've got of the Red Planet, bringing to pass the prophetic and enigmatic saying of Arthur C. Clarke's spaceman in Imperial Earth. His minor character Robert Kleinman, who perished while exploring Saturn, said "Space is small. Only the planets are big." Looking at these images will remind you of that.

Gullies in Hale Crater

No, I have no idea where Hale Crater is. But looking at these photos makes me want to figure it out. It's fascinating to see how similar Mars' landforms are to those we're used to seeing on Earth. It's easy to look at these photos and imagine wind or water creating these forms. Sure, they're landforms you might see in the bleakest portions of the Badlands or the Great Basin, but they're familiar landforms (gullies, dunes, et cetera) that you're used to seeing on Earth.

Ridges in the Northwest Meridiani Planum

I've spent more than a half hour screening the images, and each one seems more fascinating than the next. Tie all this in with Google's ambitious but lower-res Google Mars, and you've got some fun tools to play with. I'm ready to go explore on Mars. NASA, when are you going to take me there?

Telling Lies

Mom . . .

One of the more entertaining aspects of being a parent is that once and a while you get to tell some fun lies to your kids. Not lies about really serious, earth-shattering things, of course, but the fun kinds of lies that will kind of mess them up a bit or at least let them think you are a complete genius until they become teenagers, learn everything and thus believe that you as a parent know nothing. Here are a few of the lies I've recently told my children:

• Earth used to have two suns until the smaller of the two exploded just a few years before our oldest child was born.
• Lady bugs taste just like M&Ms.
• The Moon is a hole in the sky through which daylight passes.
• Mom was a Sand Person (a la Star Wars) before she married Dad.

And that was just this week.

Listen to the Speech, Already

I'm a bit confused by the kerfuffle over a speech President Obama wants to deliver nationwide to school kids with the basic message, as far as I understand, of telling the kids to work hard in school. Don't we, sorta, want our kids to work hard? And if the president wants to take time out of his schedule to deliver such a speech, isn't that, at the foundation of all things, good?

Apparently not for everyone.

The school district I attended as a kid announced today they won't air the speech at all. Other districts in the area are waffling, saying they'll let teachers decide on a classroom-by-classroom basis, basically sending the message that if teachers opt to air the speech and parents complain, the district itself can wash its hands of the mess. That's asinine.

Gratefully, the district my kids attend will be airing the speech. They sent a note home with all kids this week letting parents know of the speech and allowing students to opt out if they wish, but at least they've got the guts to send the message: This is the president talking about education. Maybe it's worth listening to.

I just don't know why there's such angst over a speech nobody's even heard yet. Personally, I like to hear speeches before I decide if they're worthwhile or not.

I firmly believe that if this were a Republican president giving such a speech, there wouldn't be any trouble locally, no matter the message. Nobody here complained when both Bushes gave speeches directly to schools, and they hadn't heard the speeches beforehand, either.

But lest Democrats get too smug about the whole situation, they ought to remember similar umbrage over Republicans "hijacking" the Department of Education to "push" their own ideals. Remember, stupid is as stupid does, Mr. Gump.

This slavish devotion to political ideology weakens public discourse and the republic as well. If one side decides not to listen to the other -- or even acknowledge that the other side might possibly be doing something worthwhile -- then we may as well be living in a dictatorship. Maybe that's what the local Republicans fear. But then again, they only fear a dictatorship led by a Democrat.

Grammar Nazi, Red-Faced

Once in a while, I take something from my blog and paste it into a private journal, because I believe some writing fills multiple functions, and sometimes I'm pretty damn lazy in writing in my private journal.

I should do it more often because it helps me find the typos. I have since gone through yesterday's post on Max Hastings' book and fixed the glaring errors. Hopefully it won't make you wince now as you read it. At least the structure won't make you wince. Maybe the content will.

Max Hastings' Nemesis

Just finished reading a second Max Hastings book -- this time focusing on the battle for Japan during the last years of World War II. And though I understand there's criticism out there about Hastings' assumptions and some nit-picking about how he cites sources, once again I come away from Hastings' book in wonderment at it all.

If anyone, and I mean anyone, tries to tell you that war is a good and a pretty thing, have them read this book. Hastings doesn't shy away from revealing the horrors of war. That's maybe a common thing from modern WWII scholars, but Hastings picks his events carefully, I think, to maximize their effect as he ties them in historically with other events and happenings. The events he describes are not there for the sake of gory description, but rather to drive home his point that while the bad guys may do terrible things, the good guys aren't necessarily stopped from doing bad things either. Ironically, he sums up something Adolf Hitler said about totalitarianism: "The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it."

I've long had an interest in reading WWII history. I grew up with stories from my Dad, who saw World War II as a civilian in the Netherlands. That means, of course, I've concentrated on the European theater. Hastings' Nemesis is the first major work I've read that concentrates on the Pacific theater. He's definitely piqued my interest. Not because I want to read about Mac Arthur, or to revel in the exploits of the U.S. Navy -- though the Navy's accomplishments are legion -- but because Hastings touches on several aspects of Americanism that I find fascinating.

First -- and I see this in myself especially -- we tend to want to see the good in people. Take Chaing Kai-shek, for example. Not necessarily the nicest guy in the world. But because he was nationalist rather than Communist, we as a nation embraced him with open arms. When that happens, we like to think of "our guy" wearing a white hat, when, in reality, whenever we may be in his presence, we really ought to be holding our noses, because the white hat is pretty tainted.

Second, Hastings brings out the American psyche in wartime: Thinking that overwhelming technological superiority is going to win it for us. He writes:

The outcome of the Pacific conflict persuaded some Americans that they could win wars with relatively small human cost, by the application of their country's boundless technological ingenuity and industrial recources. The lesson appeared to be that, if the US possessed based from which it warships and aircraft dcould strike at the land of an enemy, victories could be gained by the exenditure of mere treasure, and relatively little blood.

We've seen time and again how this doesn't work -- we seem to forget about the human element, howthe "liberatees" will regard the "liberators," not realizing that they won't regard us all as wearing the white hat. Just food for thought there, I suppose.

Hastings writes a fine balance of praise and scorn for the nations involved in the conflict. Especially interesting is his treatment of the hand-wringing over using nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He does not belittle the suffering of those who died in those horrific attacks -- nor do I -- but he does illustrate them in the context of everything else -- including atrocities committed by all sides in the conflict -- to show how they fit into the general picture. He also makes this interesting and pertinent assertion:

Not only does the use of the atomic bombs seem to have been justified in the circumstances prevailing in August 1945, but I am among those convinced that the demonstration of nuclear horror, and the global revulsion which it provoked, has contributed decisively towards preserving the world since. If the effects of nuclear attack had not been demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is overwhelmingly likely that in the Cold War era, an American or Russian leader would have convinced himself that the use of atomic weapons could be justified.

I agree with that assertion. What was a demonstration in 1945 would have been mass slaughter on a global scale even five or ten years later.

Love and Time Served

Because we're a happening, modern-in-the-aughts couple, my wife and I occasionally check in with each other on the status of our marriage. We basically send the message to each other that as long as the laundry (her job) and the toilet scrubbing (my job) are done in a timely fashion, things couldn't possibly be any better. That there's money in the bank, the kids are happy and occasionally tranquilized and there are no obvious screaming fits that make the neighbors open their windows so they can hear better is ancillary.

So I won't be doing what this fellow in Philadelphia did: He robbed a bank and dared the tellers to call the cops so he could serve time in jail to get away from his wife.

The best line from the story:

Miller’s defense attorney, Robert Beyer, said that when Miller’s wife came to pick up his car after he was in custody, she met with the arresting officer. After 20 minutes with her, the defense attorney said the officer confessed,” I was ready for jail, too,” according to the paper.

So to those with any doubts, Michelle and I have a wonderful marriage, full of love and enough gleeful angst to keep things interesting.