{"id":17254,"date":"2015-09-14T10:53:11","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T17:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17254"},"modified":"2015-09-14T11:03:34","modified_gmt":"2015-09-14T18:03:34","slug":"monday-bag-o-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17254","title":{"rendered":"Monday Bag o’ Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"340x_mixedbag72310_01\"<\/a>I know,\u00a0let’s\u00a0start Monday off with a mixed bag of bloggage and unconnected thoughts.<\/p>\n

In a previous post<\/a> I mentioned driving through Phoenix on Interstate 10. We knew about the I-10 shooter<\/a>, of course, and had actually considered changing our route through town, but then there was\u00a0a shooting on the other freeway, I-17, so we said screw it and took our chances on I-10. Half an hour down the road, safely south of\u00a0Phoenix, we heard they’d arrested a suspect. On Saturday they said\u00a0the suspect was merely a “person of interest,” not actually under arrest and probably not the shooter. Later that day Sheriff Joe’s boys\u00a0arrested three teenaged\u00a0idiots\u00a0who were committing\u00a0copycat shootings east of the city,\u00a0not with firearms but with slingshots and projectiles. The long and short of it is the shooter remains at large. Meanwhile, armed civilians have stationed\u00a0themselves on the shoulders of the freeway. Let’s hope they don’t hear a backfire and start spraying rounds into rush hour traffic.<\/p>\n

I associate this kind of random\u00a0violence not with terrorism but with plain stupidity, the kind where the afflicted have no\u00a0impulse control, no ability to consider consequences. I’m not saying there’s more stupidity\u00a0these days … the stupids have always been with us and always will be. Witness Dylan Roof’s trailer mates<\/a>, who heard him talking about\u00a0going to a church to kill people, shrugged, and went back to their shoot-’em-up video games. To be fair, at one point they did hide his\u00a0gun\u00a0…\u00a0but then they gave it back. To an actual terrorist.<\/p>\n

And then there’s this guy<\/a>, the drunk who got on a flight and passed out in his seat, seemingly harmless and haven’t we all been there, etc … except he then woke up, stood up, unzipped, and pissed\u00a0all over\u00a0the passengers in the seats ahead of him. I have a suggestion: no drunks on public transportation. Show up drunk, you ain’t getting on\u00a0board. No plane, train, or bus ride for you. But of course that would mean hiring screeners. TSA could easily handle it at airports, but who would keep drunks off trains and buses?<\/p>\n

Well, in my socialist utopia, there’ll be jobs for everyone, and the rule will be you have to work at one to reap\u00a0the benefits: living wages, affordable housing, free college tuition, nationalized\u00a0health care. There’s a few thousand new jobs\u00a0right there, turning away\u00a0drunks at train and bus stations. The rest of you slackers … most definitely including me … can get busy installing solar panels and rebuilding America’s roads, bridges, and highways.<\/p>\n

Speaking of infrastructure, Tucson voters<\/a> are going to get to vote on whether the city should keep or remove its red light cameras. I ran a red light a few years ago and got one of those photo tickets in the mail. Same thing happened to Donna. Even though we both thought our tickets were unfair, we bit the bullet and\u00a0went to traffic safety class. In spite of our own experiences, we’re all for red light cameras. We’ve lived in Tucson since late 1997 and in all that time virtually\u00a0every accident we’ve seen in town was\u00a0caused by someone running a red light. People know about the cameras now and they don’t run lights nearly as often as they used to. I think there ought to be more cameras, frankly. People talk about freedom and the American way, and that’s just bullshit. If you drive on public roads, you have to obey the rules. That’s not “taking away freedoms.” You’re always free to put up a red light in your own back yard and run it all you want.<\/p>\n

Big news! I’m going back to double-edged\u00a0safety razors. Ordered one from Amazon<\/a>, along with a 20-pack of stainless steel blades, yesterday. Total price?\u00a0Less than a four-pack of Gillette Mach 3 replacement cartridges.<\/p>\n

On Sunday afternoons our NPR station replays\u00a0TED talks. The one I listened to yesterday was so\u00a0overblown I almost changed stations: the speaker, a woman executive in the IT industry, described smartphones as artificial intelligences. Artificial intelligences? Way back in 1995, the Air Force envisioned the development of\u00a0personal digital assistants, or PDAs, devices that could store huge amounts of information (flight routes, waypoints, approach charts, radio frequencies, etc) and could be plugged into receptacles in cockpits to relieve pilots of some of the more mundane duties of aerial navigation. To my mind, that is what smartphones have become: PDAs, and very good ones. But they’re a long way from achieving consciousness. Rein it in, TED talker lady!<\/p>\n

Last week Donna and I went to a big national Hash House Harrier event in Portland, Oregon. We loved seeing\u00a0friends we used to hash with, but we and our friends are\u00a0of a certain age, mellower than we once were, less inclined to drink and party, individual islands of calm in a sea of shouting young louts and loutesses. The next national event will be just up the road in Phoenix, in October 2017. We probably won’t go. It’s been fun, but we’ve parted ways with the drinking club side of hashing.<\/p>\n

Remember when “You’ve got mail” meant there was something worth reading in your email inbox? Well, some of that old-time AOL excitement came back to me when I opened my inbox and found this email from a reader:<\/p>\n

Recently discovered your blog, really enjoy your aviation posts! Although a former Army ground pounder, would have tried the AF except I wasn’t 20\/20. \u00a0Was in Civil Air Patrol in HS.<\/p>\n

Especially like your posts on CAS. \u00a0I was at \u00a0Grafenwoher Training area in ’77 when the first A-10s flew practice missions there. \u00a0I really felt good that they were coming, giving us a better chance if the Red Tide ever came. Course, ultimately we were the tripwire…<\/p>\n

Always a positive to find another progressive former military officer on the net… Funny, I always considered myself a moderate to conservative FDR\/Truman Anti communist. \u00a0The Republican Party has gone so far right it makes me a commie.<\/p>\n

I hope the R’s return to sanity, (fat chance). \u00a0Guess I’m voting for Bernie this go round.<\/p>\n

Keep posting!
\nJack<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’ll keep me going for another year! I actually sent Jack a short answer:<\/p>\n

Dear Jack,<\/p>\n

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I\u2019m trying to get my aviation posts out to a wider audience, so it\u2019s great to hear you know about them.<\/p>\n

Most of the men I flew with were Colin Powell conservatives. A few were rabid rightwingers; one or two\u00a0were former hippies like me, although truth be told I\u2019ve always thought of myself as an Eisenhower Republican. Personally I\u2019m very conservative, by which I mean I value hard work, honesty, and moral behavior. When it comes to public policy, I\u2019m way to the left, basically a socialist. I\u2019m keeping an eye on Bernie. He hasn\u2019t been exposed to the naked hostility Hillary has battled for the past 20 years, and frankly I don\u2019t know how he\u2019d hold up under it. Maybe Biden & Warren will give it a shot. We can always hope. And we must absolutely, positively vote!<\/p>\n

Paul<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know,\u00a0let’s\u00a0start Monday off with a mixed bag of bloggage and unconnected thoughts. In a previous post I mentioned driving through Phoenix on Interstate 10. We knew about the I-10 shooter, of course, and had actually considered changing our route through town, but then there was\u00a0a shooting on the other freeway, I-17, so we said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-personal","category-a-series-of-tubes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17254"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17281,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17254\/revisions\/17281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}