A Wandering Mind

Apologies for Not Writing in a While I notice I have not written anything here since April 2019. Today is the first day of 2020, and I need to do better. I feel like I have had writer's block since I completed my dissertation in early 2016. Not that writing a dissertation is a minor accomplishment. In fact, I would have never expected to have written one during my first career in the Air Force. Also, my dissertation was probably way too wordy, as witnessed by two members of my committee actually having a disagreement on length during my dissertation defense.  The point is that writing that thing was a major investment of my time and my energy. In my 50s when I wrote it, I had determined that I was not going to pursue the path of striving for tenure. That would have involved a lot of things I was unwilling to do. It would have involved moving from the Omaha area. I was not willing to do that, because by 2016, we had a one-year-old granddaughter (she is now going on five!) who...

No, Donald, there is No Total Exoneration      Well, it's out. After long last, the Mueller Report (heavily redacted) made it to the public arena yesterday, April 18th. Since that time, scarcely 24 hours ago, we have all been arguing about it. I am slowly working my way through the report. I even ordered my print version. I plan to read the entire thing.      As expected, President Trump's enablers are defending the report as an exoneration of Trump. Of course, the president, who has a hard time just shutting up, is all over the map. He continues to insist the entire investigation was a "hoax," and in nearly the same 280-character Tweetbreath, says that the report show there was "no collusion." Not to be a logical stick-in-the-mud here, but if the investigation is a hoax, and its facts are simply a series of lies, then how can that same report exonerate him, or anyone else? And if the same investigators who indicted 35 individuals, and got seven ...

What is the U.S. Strategy in Central America?      In one of his usual rants, this past Friday (March 29th) our President said that “I've ended payments to Guatemala, to Honduras and to El Salvador. We were paying them tremendous amounts of money, and we're not paying them anymore because they haven't done a thing for us.” He then continued to post tweets about this issue over the weekend and into the new week.       As with NATO (and coincidentally, the Secretary-General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, is in Washington, D.C. this week), President Trump boils down United States policy with regard to other nations to transactions. "They haven't done a thing for us," though it is anyone's guess what he thinks the "something" is that these three nations have not provided. At least with NATO, Trump has a measuring stick to grab onto: each nation in NATO should spend two percent of their own GDP on defense. That has been a rub between the U....

U.S. Strategy for Central America

At a Loss for Words      Okay, that title is a bit misleading. I am dumbfounded and disappointed. I really do not know what to say about the findings of the Mueller investigation. However, that is why I am sitting here typing away, and in the end, I will probably write a couple of thousand words in some stream of consciousness that won't be read by too many people but myself. But heck, that is what "blogging" is all about, right? The discovery of what one is really thinking. Coming to grips with my own feelings.       First, what I said about the findings of the Mueller investigation is really not true. In fact, we do not really know what the Mueller report has to say in its entirety. All we have right now is a short letter from Attorney General Barr to the appropriate committees in Congress. This letter is important and should be read. Here is the link.   https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/24/us/politics/barr-le tter-muelle...

President Trump Threatens Violence--Congress Lets Him      President Donald Trump says a lot of things. He tweets a lot of things. He says and tweets so many things, that by this time, we have all developed something of an immunity to his words. He has become a bit like everyone's crazy uncle. When the little kids at the family Thanksgiving gathering become alarmed at what "Uncle Frank" just ranted about, and tell their parents, the parents blow it off. "Oh, buddy, don't worry, that's just Uncle Frank. He says a lot of stuff he doesn't mean." Of course, the problem is that nobody really knows what Uncle Frank means and doesn't mean. They just hope that he doesn't mean much of it, and since he has been relatively harmless for the past 78 years, they figure he will remain so.      So when Donald Trump says what he said to Brietbart News Network this week, many people (probably his supporters) say that this is just Trump being Trump. Those...

The President, Boeing, the FAA, and What the Heck does Trump Want?      In light of the unexplained crashes of two Boeing "737 Max" aircraft, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded the fleet of these aircraft operating in the United States. This comes days after the planes were grounded in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Experts I have heard on various sources say it's surprising that it took the FAA longer than its counterpart organizations to take action. However, part of the confusion probably can be traced back to President Donald Trump. The grounding of the jets was made by executive order. Trump's executive order was around 2:30 pm Eastern time, and the FAA announcement was around 3:00 pm Eastern time. So did the FAA ground the fleet (that is the FAA's job) or did Donald Trump.       A couple of days ago the Trump tweeted this: "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists...