The "Space Force" is, according to this article, going to get their own academy. So we are going to have tens of thousands of young people around the country vying to become...."Space Cadets". Word is still out whether required viewing for these elite students will include (what else?) Space Cadet or, probably even better, Spaceballs.
Either way, may the Schwartz be with you!
Perhaps I am just getting old--and I am certainly doing that--but I'm scratching my head at what appears to be a common practice among the young and (I think) single; "breadcrumbing". More or less, this is to leave messages from time to time on social media, but never bother actually asking someone out on a date.
And again, this old married dude wonders "What's the fun in that?". And it strikes him that maybe young people need some wisdom from great philosophers of the 1980s like Def Leppard and Van Halen. So here we go:
Evidently the Louisiana State University women's basketball team has lost their star center, Ukrainian Kate Koval, after recruiting another center from Russia, Anna Minaeva. The coach apparently wanted to use the two players as "ambassadors" to help mend fences, but apparently is a bit slow on the uptake regarding sport in Russia. More or less, if one does not mouth fealty to Putin, one does not play in Russia; so this is really akin not just to having a black player share time with a white one, but rather is akin to having a black player sharing time with a white player who "wears his bedsheets", and then wondering why the black player simply isn't having it.
Really, between things like this and the WNBA's shenanigans--failing to call fouls, not being sure what a woman actually is--we might infer that women's basketball is flat out trying to undo all the good Title IX has done.
And of course, best wishes to Miss Koval. I hope and pray she finds a great place to play the sport she loves, and gains her education as well.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has argued that "bottom surgery" is akin to circumcision. Well, I guess there is a superficial similarity in that tissue is removed from that part of the body, but millions of Jewish (and Muslim, ahem) wives would affirm that the "essential function" of that part of the body is retained with circumcision, and (apart from Lorena Bobbitt types) would generally affirm that they would be more than disappointed if their husbands' circumcisions were replaced by bottom surgery.
Really, it seems to take elite college degrees--and apparently a Rhodes Scholarship in El-Sayed's case--to make a person as catastrophically stupid as El-Sayed. Or perhaps he's being rather nostalgic for the "good old days" of the harem system in the Ottoman Empire, where captive women were sold into sex slavery, and the men from their towns who otherwise would have married them were either killed, or castrated and turned into harem attendants.
Whatever the fact is, El-Sayed does not appear to understand that there are reasons we don't allow minors to make certain permanent decisions, and hence he's (even apart from his anti-Semitism) an extremely poor choice for elective office at any level.
A court in Syria has condemned former strongman Bashar Assad to death, but on the light side, it strikes me that he's serving a far worse sentence already; living in Russia. One has to wonder how many fist-fights he's gotten into while trying to get gas for his Honda Spree.
I had a very interesting conversation with a young gentleman in the meat section of the grocery store last night; he made a wisecrack about "Soviet era" technology (old meat scales) being used there. OK, it was nowhere near 1980s era technology--no red LEDs, etc..--but it was a fun opportunity to tell him what real Soviet era technology looked like. I mentioned the Trabant (1955 Fiat with two cycle engine, body made of used clothes), East German chocolate, and the like--and he was shocked.
And as I watched him, I realized why the younger generation is willing to vote for "Democratic Socialists". They simply have never learned about Communism. They don't know about waiting a decade or more for a car or TV set, about long lines for bread, meat, and clothes, and they especially don't know about the gulags.
Now part of this is that, in the public schools, you never get to the end of the history book. My senior level history class in 1986-7 hardly touched the Vietnam War, which ended of course (for us) in 1973. But that said, that's only 14 years--and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Shouldn't history teachers be covering things 37 years back?
And perhaps they are, but I think the reality is that since teachers are by and large paid by the state, and thus they have little incentive to share what happens when the state oversteps its bounds. In my high school experience, for example, our teachers (in a very conservative town no less) really didn't admit that economic "panics" tended to last only 1-2 years until Hoover and FDR tried to "help".
So why don't people know about the horrors of Communism? They've never been taught. I would suggest that some of the same weakness might have a lot to do with the rise in anti-semitism today. People have simply forgotten the Holocaust.
One final note is that when I was starting my career, I had the privilege of working with a number of Jews who had fled the USSR. I asked why, and the response was that one's passport--which in the USSR enabled internal travel as well as international--clearly noted if a person was Jewish, which enabled every wannabe Cossack in the security services to initiate their own personal pogrom at any time. How soon we forget!
