Brutally Honest

Life Flight

By BroKen

Remembering my first-born son's arrival eighteen years ago today, I share a poem I wrote sometime later:

When I was a boy I was given a toy;
A bright shiny airplane. What wonder! What joy!

Pretending, I'd climb in the cockpit and I
Went all through the house. In my airplane I'd fly!

But where is it now? That bright shiny plane
Lies broken and rusted: left out in the rain.

It was real fun. Real wonder. Real joy.
But love may not last 'tween a boy and his toy.

I wonder if Dad felt any dismay
When I neglected, discarded his gift in that way?

Now as a man I've been given a boy.
A person who'll fly with me with wonder and joy.

We'll dream and we'll play all over the house
With permission, of course, from his mother, my spouse.

But what will he be? How high will he go?
Will his Daddy and playmate be able to show

Him the Way and the Bread and the Truth and the Light?
I fear I'm not worthy. So much is not right!

But Daddy in Heaven say, "Don't worry. You'll see.
Love is the answer and love comes from Me."

Oh Father, I pray since our flight has begun
Make love last forever 'tween father and son.

Happy Birthday, Karl. I am very proud of you!

Scrap NASA

That word from a former Astronaut:

NASA should be scrapped in favor of a new agency, one with the sole objective of furthering America's exploration of deep space. So says Harrison Schmitt, the last man to set foot on the moon, in a proposal published online Wednesday.

Schmitt, a member of Apollo 17 in 1972 and later a one-term U.S. senator, proposed that the new space agency be called the National Space Exploration Administration.

...

Schmitt believes refocusing on space exploration is crucial for the United States to maintain its status as a superpower.

"This is not just a competition between nations; it's a competition between freedom and tyranny," Schmitt said. "The United States is the only power on Earth today that has in its DNA a protection of liberty, and if we decide to back off from space or any other major human endeavor, then we put that liberty in jeopardy.

"The Obama administration has basically said that they won't pursue an exceptional space program for the United States and that they're just as happy to have China move forward into deep space, and be dependent on Russia for transport to the International Space Station."

Schmitt, who was elected to the Senate in 1976 as a Republican from New Mexico, says China's domination of deep space and Russia's domination of near-Earth space would lower America's international standing of the U.S. in the same way the Soviet Union winning the space race would have changed the outcome of the Cold War.

On top of the perceptions and politics, Schmitt argues that deep-space exploration is necessary for controlling space resources — in particular, a fusion fuel called helium-3 that comes from the sun and is preserved in lunar soils. "Under certain financial constraints, helium-3 can be economically viable as a fuel for fusion power reactors here on Earth, and to have that dominated by another power such as China I think would be very dangerous for us. That's just another aspect of the geopolitical significance of exploration," Schmitt said.

NASA today has lost its way.  Schmitt's idea seems sound and may be the best way for this country to regain its space and exploration footing.

Thoughts?

Wife flies plane when pilot husband stricken

Fascinating story coming out of Colorado:

The Federal Aviation Administration released audio and details today from a terrifying drama that occurred in the skies last week when a woman who had never flown a plane was forced to take the controls after her pilot-husband fell ill.

"I'm trying to help. Hang on," said the woman, who has not been identified.

She and her pilot-husband, 70, were flying a small Cirrus propeller plane from San Bernardino, Calif., to Colorado Springs, Colo., on May 17, when he appeared to lose consciousness as the aircraft reached 16,000 feet.

Air traffic controllers at the Denver control center feared the pilot was suffering from a lack of oxygen because of the high altitude.

"I think you might be experiencing some hypoxia," said Charlie Rohrer, an air traffic controller, on the audio. "Would you like a lower altitude?"

The pilot replied, "One Whiskey Alpha," the name used to identify the Cirrus.

"You're barely readable," the controller said.

The pilot nearly passed out and his wife frantically contacted air traffic control.

"Hang on, hang on," she said. "I'm trying to get him to put it on autopilot. I don't know [how] to do this."

The pilot of a Great Lakes Airlines flight heading to New Mexico was listening in and was familiar with the Cirrus plane. He told the woman what knobs to turn and which buttons to press to get to a lower altitude.

"Are you descending now?" the pilot asked the woman.

"Yes. ... We're at 15,000," she replied.

He asked her whether she'd flown a plane before and she responded: "No."

Rohrer, a 22-year veteran, told the woman to turn the plane around and head southeast to avoid hitting mountains.

The woman, who said she was having breathing problems, as well, said: "I got to get down."

Although the Cirrus was equipped with an emergency parachute that could have lowered the aircraft to the ground, it was not necessary because as the plane descended its pilot began to wake up.

Because the Cirrus pilot was still woozy, the Great Lakes pilot told the air traffic controller to declare an emergency.

"He's totally incapacitated," the Great Lakes pilot said. "You need to get him [lower] now."

But the Cirrus pilot replied, "I am not totally incapacitated."

The air traffic controller persuaded the pilot to land the plane and it eventually did in Farmington, N.M.

ABC's got audio of the ordeal at the link.  Hats off to the Great Lakes Airlines crew.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Is it worth laying down your life?

By BroKen

They say a coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man only once. As we head into the Memorial Day weekend, this coward has been considering the thousands of ways soldiers can die.

Some die on the battlefield. Some die in a hospital. Some die instantly never having much of a clue what happened to them. Some die hours or days later as their bodies painfully succumb to their wounds. Some die in the sky. Some die at sea. Some die in open air. Some die trapped in machines that were supposed to protect them. Some die in flames. Some die smothered in water or mud. Some die with a glorious hope that their cause is just and victory is assured. Some die in despair believing their sacrifice and the sacrifice of their many friends is all in vain.

I grew up during the Vietnam War and I remember the protest songs proclaiming that war was horrific and stupid.  But a few patriotic songs reacted to the protest by honoring the sacrifice and bravery of those who died. Both kinds of songs agreed that war was hell. But protest songs said it was pointless. The patriotic songs said that enduring that hell could be beautiful in the end.

My favorite of the protest songs is Requiem for the Masses by The Association. The song weaves religious and patriotic images together into a formidable fabric. The first verse passionately describes the death of a soldier.

Red was the color of his blood flowing thin.
Pallid white was the color of his lifeless skin.
Blue was the color of the morning sky,
He saw looking up from the ground where he died.
It was the last thing ever seen by him.

This sorrowful scene is followed by a wailing choral “kyrie eleison” which means “Lord, have mercy.” 

The song could have been patriotic. But a subtle protest comes in the second verse. A question is raised but never answered.

Black and white were the figures that recorded him.
Black and white was the newsprint he was mentioned in.
Black and white was the question that so bothered him.
He never asked, he was taught not to ask,
But was on his lips as they buried him.

Well, gentlemen, with all due respect to your beautiful song, I don't think the question is so black and white. Leaving the question unstated and unanswered makes the sorrowful death seem pointless and pathetic. Hence the protest.

But what is the question and is there an answer? The question is, “Is it worth laying down your life for your friends?” Every soldier answers that question with actions much louder than mere words.

It isn't hard to imagine a soldier in their last few moments of life wondering if it was worth it. But those of us who enjoy the great benefits of those thousands and thousands of sacrifices must remember and answer, “Thank you. God bless you for your great love.”

With that answer to the question, the song is no longer a protest but a dirge. So, here it is:

"Something deeply fraudulent"

That's the CatholicHerald's response to Obama's speech in Ireland:

Wilkie Collins said that the way to grip an audience was to “Make ’em laugh; make ’em cry; make ’em wait”, and nobody does it better. I was impressed. But I have to say also that I think there was something deeply fraudulent about the whole operation. Not so much in his implied claim to be the kind of Irish American that the Irish voter back home identifies with. The real implied claim was that his values were Irish values. And his real values, quite simply, are such that if at College Green he had spelled them out in any detail, that adoring crowd would have become at first embarrassed, and then hostile. It may be that support for the Catholic Church in Ireland is not, given its recent history, what it was (though Mass attendance is still among the highest in Europe). But Catholic values and beliefs are another thing entirely. And those values and beliefs are very far from being Obama’s. As I have written before in this space,

“… across the whole spectrum of contemporary moral issues, he is passionately committed to a series of views which run directly contrary to those of the Church. All this has caused at least one Catholic bishop (there are probably others) to call him anti-Catholic.

“As a Senator, he supported sex education, to be provided by Planned Parenthood, to children of five years old. He consistently voted for abortion, including partial birth abortion. He voted (twice) against Bills prohibiting public funding of abortions; he voted in favour of expanding embryonic stem cell research; he voted against notifying parents of minors who had undergone out-of-state abortions; he voted for a proposal to vote $100,000,000 for the funding of sex-education and contraceptives (including abortifacients) for teenagers; he opposed the “Born Alive Infants Protection Act” on the Senate floor and in 2003 killed the bill in committee. This would have outlawed “live birth abortion,” where labor is induced and an infant is delivered prematurely and then allowed to die.”

The fact is that Irish America (whether individuals are orthodox and practising or not) is the heartland of the pro-life movement. And to see that Irish crowd in College Green gripped, held in the palm of Obama’s hand by his formidable oratorical powers so that Irish voters back home could observe his triumph was a spectacle that made me feel distinctly queasy. It was nothing less than blatant electioneering, and I hope that Catholic voters see through it.

My hope is that Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, Secularist and every kind of voter see Obama as someone who's been committed to blatant electioneering since he was elected... and that they'll promptly boot his butt out of office come 2012.

H/T The Anchoress on her FB page.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Anguish (UPDATED) (AGAIN)

I put myself in the shoes of one of these parents and I think I'd simply fall apart:

Mike Hare has scoured the ravaged neighborhood where his 16-year-old son Lantz was seen last. He's called hospitals from Dallas to Kansas City and taken dozens of calls offering advice, prayers and hopeful tips.

None of the calls came from Lantz. None offered any hope he might still be alive.

Hare has been looking for his son since Sunday, when much of the southwest Missouri city of Joplin was leveled by a tornado that now ranks as the nation's single deadliest tornado since the National Weather Service started keeping records.

"We know he's hurt somewhere," Hare said Wednesday, his voice breaking. "We just can't sit and keep calling. You've got to be moving."

Hare is among an increasingly desperate group of people in Joplin pleading for help in tracking down one of the dwindling number of people still missing in the wake of Sunday's storm. They're scrawling signs in wreckage, calling in by the hundreds to local radio stations and posting on the Internet. They are inspiring city officials to continue search and rescue efforts, yet there is no talk yet of recovery.

...

The evening of the tornado, Lantz Hare was driving with a friend who said the two tried to take cover in the parking lot of a grocery store. The tornado shattered the windows and crumpled the car, and Mike Hare found Lantz's backpack in the wreckage.

He said he would keep searching until he found his son, dead or alive.

"If you look at the ground, life will pass you by," he said. "I won't let life pass me by."

Lord, help this father find his son.  Help all whose loved ones have yet to be found.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

UPDATE: I've found a related CNN report:

SECOND UPDATE: Sadly, Lantz Hare did not make it:

The family resumed their search in the area around the car on Tuesday, when Michelle Hare ran into a man who said he had been assisting the National Guard late Sunday night. The man said he had stood watch over the body of a young man he described as wearing the same khaki shorts Lantz had been wearing, until a law enforcement officer took the body away.

Mr. Green said Lantz's friend J.T. later told Michelle Hare that the force of the wind blew out the car's windows and that he climbed into the back seat. That's all he remembered before waking up in a van that someone used to transport him to the hospital, Mr. Green said.

Mr. Green, who said Lantz's mother was too overwhelmed to be interviewed, said she heard there was an unidentified body of a young man at the morgue, but she had not been able to view it.

On Thursday afternoon, Ms. Hare learned that the morgue had identified her son's body.

Big name astronauts question Obama's space leadership

 
 
And they do so in an op-ed at USA Today:

"We intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation."— President Kennedy

...

The response to Kennedy's bold challenge a half-century ago has led to America's unchallenged leadership in space. We take enormous pride in all that has been accomplished in the past 50 years. And we have the people, the skills and the wherewithal to continue to excel and reach challenging goals in space exploration.

But today, America's leadership in space is slipping. NASA's human spaceflight program is in substantial disarray with no clear-cut mission in the offing. We will have no rockets to carry humans to low-Earth orbit and beyond for an indeterminate number of years. Congress has mandated the development of rocket launchers and spacecraft to explore the near-solar system beyond Earth orbit. But NASA has not yet announced a convincing strategy for their use. After a half-century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America's leadership in space exploration is no longer apparent.

Of course there's much more and the Astronauts launching against Obama here are none other than Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon,  Jim Lovell, the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 and Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon.

Their words should carry weight.  Their words should be heard by many.  Their words should be acted upon.

Will they?

"Mr. Bailey has an axe to grind and abandoned truth in his book"

We're beginning to find out more as to Frank Bailey's "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin" and surprise, there are serious questions as to the veracity of much contained therein:

In their first comments about the book since several media outlets obtained a leaked manuscript in February, two sources close to Palin disputed several of the anecdotes in the book, including his claims of illegal coordination with the Republican Governors Association and that he has seen Palin’s deposition in the so-called “Troopergate” case, which is sealed. Palin’s camp also insists that some of the Palin emails printed in the manuscript are framed to distort events — for example, the emails Bailey includes to show the former Alaska governor’s reaction to her oldest daughter’s pregnancy are about rumors that circulated before Bristol actually became pregnant.

Palin aides also pointed to previous ethics charges against Bailey during his service to the ex-governor’s administration, as well as an ongoing investigation by the state attorney general’s office over the emails Bailey included in the book. Additionally, SarahPAC spokesman Tim Crawford highlighted Bailey’s book cover, which is a modified image. The original photo was of Palin standing next to other governors at an RGA event, not next to Bailey.

“Frank Bailey was the only member of the Palin administration to be found to have acted unethically – twice,” Crawford said. “He is currently under investigation again by the state attorney general. Then, as the administrator of certain email accounts, he acted unethically by appropriating account information he was entrusted to protect.”

“Gov. Palin suspended Bailey and refused to hire Bailey when he sought a position on her vice presidential campaign staff and later with SarahPAC. Mr. Bailey has an axe to grind and abandoned truth in his book. The cover of the book tells this story, two completely different photos twisted and Photoshopped to create a fraudulent image. The book belongs on the fiction shelves.”

Along with so much that is written about the woman by the media. 

The Palin hatred is severe and is sure to increase should she throw her hat into the Presidential ring for 2012.  And that hat may very well be on the verge of being tossed if these reports are any indication:

Shortly after Republicans swept last November to a historic victory in which Sarah Palin was credited with playing a central role, the former Alaska governor pulled aside her close aide, Rebecca Mansour, to discuss a hush-hush assignment: Reach out to conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon with a request. Ask him if he would make a series of videos extolling Palin's governorship and laying to rest lingering questions about her controversial decision to resign from office with a year-and-a-half left in her first term. It was this abdication, Palin knew, that had made her damaged goods in the eyes of some Republicans who once were eager to get behind her potential 2012 presidential campaign.

The response was more positive than Palin could have hoped for. He'd make a feature-length movie, Bannon told Mansour, and he insisted upon taking complete control and financing it himself -- to the tune of $1 million.

The fruits of that initial conversation are now complete. The result is a two-hour-long, sweeping epic, a rough cut of which Bannon screened privately for Sarah and Todd Palin last Wednesday in Arizona, where Alaska's most famous couple has been rumored to have purchased a new home. When it premieres in Iowa next month, the film is poised to serve as a galvanizing prelude to Palin's prospective presidential campaign -- an unconventional reintroduction to the nation that she and her political team have spent months eagerly anticipating, even as Beltway Republicans have largely concluded that she won't run.

We'll learn soon enough.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

For a guy they tell us constantly is so smart...

.. he sure does do some dumb things:

This is how President Obama signed the guestbook at Westminster Abbey earlier today, where he got a tour from the Very Reverend Dr. John Hall and laid a wreath on the Grave of the Unknown Warrior.

It is a great privilege to commemorate our common heritage, and common sacrifice.

Barack Obama

24 May 2008

For the liberals visiting, today is 24 May 2011... just sayin'.

But wait, there's more:

"I want everybody in Joplin, everybody in Missouri, everybody in Minnesota, everybody across the Midwest to know that we are here for you," the president said Tuesday in London, the second stop on his four-country, six-day tour of Europe.

Here being London... sigh...

Dude's so much smarter than Bush isn't he?  I'm sure if we polled the 57 states he governs, there'd be consensus on that.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

If at first you don't succeed...

... why not try shutting the hell up?

After a few days of silence — as thousands reveled in the fact that they hadn't been Raptured on Saturday — Judgment Day-calculator Harold Camping figured out a way to spin his (second!) failed prediction: it actually did happen, you just didn't see it. The 89-year-old Christian radio station owner explained on Monday night, during a Family Radio station broadcast, that rather than a physical Rapture taking place, the judgment was spiritual. But don't worry; the real end of the world is still ahead.

Camping did admit to at least one mistake: that he'd been reading the Bible with a factual mindset, rather than a spiritual one, which is why he'd misinterpreted Saturday's events.

"On May 21, this last weekend, this is where the spiritual aspect of it really comes through," said Camping. "God again brought judgment on the world. We didn't see any difference but God brought Judgment Day to bear upon the whole world. The whole world is under Judgment Day and it will continue right up until Oct. 21, 2011 and by that time the whole world will be destroyed."

It's tough to muster up sympathy for this dude, especially given the reports that his ministry is making money hand over fist, but Rod Dreher is suggesting that what the guy is really doing, albeit rather badly, is responding to a particularly universal need:

To be drunk on Apocalypse is a fearful thing. There is no problem that the Apocalypse -- religious or secular -- cannot solve. I roll my eyes at the crude Armageddonists, whose number I left behind as a teenager, but the radical prospect of rebirth through total catastrophe still tempts me in less culturally embarrassing ways. I read secular prophets with more mainstream credibility -- peak-oil catastrophists, economic Cassandras, and global-warming gloomers -- and that familiar decadent feeling returns: the perverse pleasure in the prospect of catastrophe, because, to paraphrase the poet C.V. Cavafy, the End is a kind of solution.

The world didn't end last weekend, but for the Camping faithful, a world ended. But not for long. The human need for utopia and its shadow side, apocalypse, will not be suppressed. That's one prophecy that's not going to fail because, as John Gray puts it, both are "myths, which answer the human need for meaning."

David Mills answers the mail on that need for me quite tightly and makes me regret (somewhat) my opening line to this post:

Fortunately, the Christian tradition provides a vision of the end of history we can easily commend to our children, and to everyone else, as a wisdom and a hope that cannot be weird and uncool. A man might not believe it, but he would be a fool to think it comical or crazy.

In being directed to reflect on the end of history, we are being directed to reflect on the men and women we ought to be. The orthodox Christian belief in the Lord who will “come again in glory, to judge the living and the dead,” as the Apostles Creed declares, should make us more attentive to the end to which our lives should be directed, and to the inevitability of death and the possibility that it is closer to us than we realize, even if we are still young. (One of my closest friends growing up survived two years battling a vicious cancer, only to die of another, entirely unrelated cancer at 22.)

It should make us live so that we earn the lines we’d like written on our gravestones. It should make us strive to be men and women of virtue. It should drive us closer to the Lord who will make us what we want to be. It should produce in us a greater love for the Lord who (to adapt a prayer from the Mass) we pray will “grant us his peace in this life, save us from final damnation, and count us among those he has chosen.”

That can easily be commended, with no risk that at 6:05 one night you will know you’d been fooled. The world will still try to make such reflections look weird and uncool, but how weird and uncool can it possibly be to be a saint?