The Moon in June

…being what I'd like to show current-Administration buffoons. They wouldn't look, though — that sounds too much like science. Oh, you thought I meant the other "moon"?

• About a month back, the Chicago Tribune demonstrated its conscious ignorance of history. It probably wasn't the reporter, who actually works for AP. There's actually only one word — ok, one acronym — that you really need to know to understand air-traffic control problems in the US: PATCO. The same complaints and problems from the 1970s have resurfaced now — overstressed controllers (and not nearly enough of them), unreliable and out-of-date equipment and communications, purported military training exercises planned without regard to, well, reality that impair traffic control (perhaps inevitable when groundpounders fly, especially off-base; a little interservice rivalry never hurt anyone, right?), a management attitude that the lowly employees don' know nuthin'…
• How 'bout a little more of that interservice rivalry? Perhaps pointed at this Administration's pretty-much-universal mishandling of military personnel, or maybe at just SecDef? I'd refer those undereducated blithering idiots to historical studies of which I'm aware bearing directly on "the meaning of 'warfighting' in conflicts without rigidly-defined front lines," but (a) that would mean they'd have to actually read them and (b) letting them handle that material would just create more opportunities for mishandling of classified information (notwithstanding that some of that material is at minimum overclassified). That last parenthetical reflects reinforcement of "civilian" ignorance and, thus, the classification itself causes grave damage to national security that can be specifically identified, but that's for another time… and might well itself be classified.

  Perhaps part of the problem is that those "warfighters" — like SecDef wants to portray himself — don't have a clue about what it takes to fight a war above company/single-vessel/single-flight level. Or to train for it, get to the battlefield, sustain operations for longer than a couple of gaming sessions, plan for all of the above, train for all of the above… The American Way of War is now, and has been since the late 19th century, to pin the opponent in place, degrade the opponent's logistics while building up friendly in-theater forces, and then overcome our own generally below-average top leadership with well-trained and well-motivated working-class cannon fodder deployed forces. It hasn't ever been about being a superior first-person-shooter player… especially considering that in the real world, you don't get a new life by restarting the game.

• Let's ponder something a little easier than "effective civilian control of the military by means other than Stalinist purges leading to Russian Roulette." Perhaps we could just ponder what constitutes antisemitism, or if we can't agree on that appropriate responses thereto. That latter failyuah to communicate reflects a more-fundamental failure: Not understanding that "Never Again!" means everyone; it means always. Objecting to what's going on in Gaza need not be "antisemitic" — maybe it's just "antiatrocity." (We just don't need to get into the technicalities — legal, sociopolitical, linguistic, propagandistic — among "genocide," "genecidal acts," "unlawful selection of targets for military force," or any of the other buzzwords; "atrocity" will do just fine, focusing on the act more than the rationale.) That some who are objecting to what's happening in Gaza really are, or at least are really expressing in the mode of, the antisemitic, doesn't mean everyone who objects is; "one," "some," even "most" is not all… and making that error is the very foundation of European antisemitism.
• It was bad enough when McCarthy et al. went after "the arts" with their witchhunts seeking to identify any of the fifty-seven card carrying communists in the Department of Defense. Now they're going after those who would respond (within the decade) to Sputnik (an undoubted Commie achievement!). Of course, this latter is perhaps inevitable when virtually no member of this Administration has even been in a laboratory in decades (and even that was probably a freshman-level survey course). Even history professors right across the river from disreputable, uncooperative private colleges like Hahvahd understand that. That said, one must wonder if there's a history of rejections from (various parts of) Hahvahd somehow at issue…
• Next it'll be the humanities faculties. Then, probably at "less prestigious" institutions that don't study "popular" fiction on the grounds that if the great unwashed like it, it must be easy and therefore unworthy, we'll see many of the mistakes in this screed — from which I dissent, and align myself with Voltaire (and, ultimately, Tolkein — however much I disagree with some aspects) and against John Crowe Ransom. The content revealed by "close reading" of the text while ignoring its context is somewhere between merely ignorant and actively misleading.