Still Disappointed in BSG

Maybe they will turn out to be relevant to tonight's episode, but my impression is that BSG pretty much wasted the last three "insurrection" episodes. Commander Adama puts down the mutiny . . . and the fleet finds itself exactly where it was three episodes ago, except lighter by two semi-major characters. Meanwhile, no new themes were introduced; on the contrary, the episodes worked hard to turn old themes into cliches.

Am I the only one who thinks that Lt ("Commander") Gaeta had a point? First, setting the terms by which the rebel Cylons become naturalized Colonials is almost definitionally a function of the civilian legislature, a.k.a. Quorum of Twelve. And second, the career arc of Boomer ought to give pause to accepting Cylon protestations of loyalty at face value. The original Lt. Valieri was the Manchurian Candidate sleeper agent, activated against her will into a saboteur and assassin under conditions which nobody has fully explained. I'm prepared to believe that the destruction of the resurrection hub put an end to Cavil's ability to remote-control the Cylons in the future . . . but nobody has even bothered to make that case in an intelligent way.

Instead, unreflective Cylon hatred was the only currency of the mutineers, never mind the considerable assistance that this particular group of Cylons had given to the Colonials already. Analogies are difficult, but imagine if the U.S. had spurned Cold War defectors on the grounds that "we hate all 'dem Ruskies!" Further, we are treated to the absurdity of Gaeta going through the motions of a trial so he can kill Adama. What's the point? At least a "show trial" would have provided a public cover for what he wanted to do anyway. But this private trial didn't even do that!

But the writers had to weaken the cause of the mutineers so the audience won't notice how weak Adama's case is. First, there's the arbitrary exercise of authority (again); second, the sudden and unexplained necessity of upgrading the fleet's FTL drives, which suddenly aren't as high-tech as the Cylon drives.

By the standards of the first two seasons, these are gaping holes in the show's writing, but it has this in common with almost every other modern story on the same theme: an impatience with due process. In every internecine conflict, the audience has always been expected to root for Commander Adama, and disdain the democratically elected Colonial officials. And we do! We have a hunger for the Man on Horseback, riding to wield whatever power, that's unseemly in a self-governing people.

On Growing a General

Coming across the desk is news that the Air Force will be deleting deployment history from the duty qualification briefs used to select officers for promotion:

"Many factors have led to the recent change in policy," said Colonel Giles, "especially since deployments now take many forms across the Air Force."

In addition to "traditional" deployments, such as long-term deployments to the area of responsibility, some career fields such as space and missile and unmanned aircraft system operators do not typically deploy but provide daily support to the war on terrorism.

As Col. Potter might say, "horse hockey!" Yes, the Air Force needs missileers and drone pilots, just as it needs engineers and cooks. But I want my generals to know what burning flesh smells like. I want them to have felt the fear of death in combat. These experiences are vital to the proper perspective of senior commanders, and you don't get them sitting in a silo or moving a joystick.

My uninformed guess -- colored by my background assumption that nothing the military bureaucracy says should be taken at face value -- is somebody noticed that women weren't deploying overseas in the same proportion as men, and is striving to ensure that this fact doesn't increase the percentage of men being promoted.

Adventures is Plumbing

The Monday before Christmas, the shower in our master bath stopped working.

My wife called me as I was on the way home from the gym. I was taking the week off, and had been looking forward to catching up on my exercise. Ironically, this was the very day that the appraiser visited, which had us quite worried that we would be written up for "non-working appliances" or something that would crater our home value for our refinance. Fortunately, he never actually tested the appliances, but we still had a broken shower.

Our shower has one of those single control handles where the temperature is controlled by how far to the left the handle is twisted. Pretty standard, I think, although I don't know all the technical details. I'm not a plumber.

I attempted to unscrew the hex bolt holding on the handle to expose the mechanism behind it, but the buildup of whatever gunk is in our water system prevented this, and I had to basically rip the handle off. This exposed what is known as, alternately, a "manifold", or "universal rough", depending on whom you ask. It's the device that controls the mixture of hot and cold water (pipes 1 and 2) going to the shower head (pipe 3). Not knowing what else to do (I'm not a plumber), I took a hammer to the bathroom tiles to expose the pipe connections. The master bath is relatively new compared to the house, and the shower piping is copper instead of the galvanized metal we have most everywhere else. Being copper, the pipes had been soldered to the manifold, which means that replacing the manifold would require cutting the pipes to free them from my broken manifold.

Resisting the urge to call an actual plumber, I consulted with the good folks at Lowes on how to attack this problem. They happily sold me a $250 shower set (manifold and pretty new handle and head), an itty bitty pipe cutter to fit inside the itty bitty space I had to work, plus these really nifty connectors that would snap onto my cut pipes and screw (rather than solder) into my manifold. (Yeah, I know, I was skeptical too, but really they work pretty well if you put them on correctly. Which I did. Eventually. After more consultation at Lowes.)

It took many, many hours working my itty bitty pipe cutter back and forth, back and forth, to cut through my copper pipes, but I eventually freed the dead manifold. With little attention to the directions, I then tried to put the new manifold in place. I discovered that, with the snap on connectors, I hadn't taken enough copper pipe off. So more hours of cutting. I connected the new manifold and the connections leaked. Back to Lowes for more instructions, and at least one new connector. I brought it home and set to reconnect. Would you believe that, in my haste, I had grabbed a female instead of a male connector? Lowe's is twenty-five minutes each way!

Eventually, I had the new manifold in place. I still needed to replace the tile, but I wanted to test it to make sure that it worked. I turned on the water source again and lo: the water poured out of the shower! But it wouldn't turn off, no matter which way I twisted the plastic tab to which I assumed my pretty new handle would eventually connect!

I turned off the water source and consulted the directions. Wherein I read words to the effect of "unscrew the flange of the manifold and insert the shower control".

"Open up the manifold . . ."?

The manifold opens?!?

I leaned back and let out a breath. I now had several days and $300 into this project, and I still had to repair the drywall and replace the tiles in the hole in my shower wall that I had made to tear out the manifold. And now, come to find out, that there was in all probability nothing wrong with the manifold I had cut out of the wall, but only with the shower control that went inside the manifold, and all I would have needed to do was unscrew the flange holding the control in place and replace it with a new $30 control?

The blogger formerly known as Bobvis once wrote a post about the difference between disappointment and regret, and how the latter emotion was much more crushing than the former. He was right. Finding out that I would have to spend my Christmas vacation doing plumbing: that was disappointment. Finding out all that work and expenditure was unnecessary: that was regret.

On Socially Confident Women

At the ice rink the other day, I noticed a couple of young (late teen, I think) women wearing ankle length dresses and head coverings. Amish getup, or maybe Mennonite, but anyway, some sect that requires distinctive dress for women. I hadn't ever noticed them there before, even though they owned their own skates and skated well enough to be regulars.

Anyway, as we were heading around the rink I caught one's eye and nodded a greeting. And in return, I was rewarded with . . . full eye contact! A smile! A "hello"!

Poor, poor Amish girls. If they weren't so oppressed by religion, they would know to avoid eye contact with men, and quickly look away when one says hello.

Lessons of Iraq

David Frum has written a four-part summary of a report by the "Special Inspector General of Iraqi Reconstruction". David Frum:

Six years, four thousand lives and hundreds of billions of dollars later, we seem at last to have stabilized Iraq. This weekend’s elections occurred peacefully, and the US goal of an Iraq that does not threaten its neighbors or its people now looks within reach. Yet we all have to be haunted by the question: Did it have to take so long and cost so much?

Inspector General Stuart Bowen’s damning study strongly suggests the answer: No.

Oh dear. I already fear where this is going: now that we know what mistakes not to make, next time we can avoid them!

This is not the lesson I was hoping for. When it comes to the Middle East, the lesson I was hoping for was: don't get any of it on you.

Levin's Review of Sarah Palin

Yuval Levin (H.T.: Ross Douthat) offers a compelling description of America's cultural fault lines in the context of the Palin candidacy. In particular, he has this exactly right:

The sense of potential that accompanied Palin’s introduction, and the feeling that she might really reverse the momentum of the campaign, were not illusory. For two weeks or so, the polls moved markedly in McCain’s direction, as it seemed that his running mate was something genuinely new in American politics: a lower-middle-class woman who spoke the language of the country’s ordinary voters and had a profound personal understanding of the hopes and worries of a vast swath of the public. She really did seize the attention of swing voters, as McCain’s team had hoped she might. Her convention speech, her interviews, and her debate performance drew unprecedented audiences.

But having finally gotten voters to listen, neither Palin nor McCain could think of anything to say to them. Palin’s reformism, like McCain’s, was essentially an attitude devoid of substance. Both Republican candidates told us they hated corruption and would cut excess and waste. But separately and together, they offered no overarching vision of America, no consistent view of the role of government, no clear description of what a free society should look like, and no coherent policy ideas that might actually address the concerns of American families and offer solutions to the serious problems of the moment. Palin’s populism was not her weakness, but her strength. Her weakness was that she failed to tie her populism to anything deeper. A successful conservative reformism has to draw on cultural populism, but it has also to draw on a worldview, on ideas about society and government, and on a policy agenda. This would make it more intellectual, but not necessarily less populist.

McCain’s advisers were right about Palin: she was a mirror image of John McCain. She was not a visionary politician, or a programmatic politician, but an attitude politician with an appealing biography. In the end, she was no more able than McCain to offer a coherent rationale for his presidency.

As my readers know, I was an early Sarah Palin fan, primarily on Ross's recommendation; her selection was, in fact, the only reason that I voted for McCain. But Levin's assessment echoes my own private thoughts on watching her appearances: but for Ross's assurance that Palin would be The People's Tribune, I asked myself, how would I know it from what she says? Yes, Palin is a social conservative, but as Levin points out, she was only this in a perfunctory way. It's not that she wasn't sincere; on the contrary, she lived her values in a way that few other pro-life candidates have. But clearly, the paradigm by which she understood the objectives of social conservatism was primarily reactive: she might recognize a bad idea when she saw it, but there was nothing of urgency that she wanted her ticket, if elected, to accomplish in the realm of social policy. But if not social conservative objectives, then what? What would she do? What new policies would she pursue? Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I didn't come away from the campaign with a clear answer to those questions. Absent specifics, promises to "control spending" are pretty weak, and everything else was even weaker.

The worst disappointment of all was her silence on immigration. We needed more than just talk of border security; we needed a compeling articulation of why our high immigrant population was undermining our quality of life, our public fisc, and (though this was more than anybody could really expect) our national solidarity. But Sarah Palin gave no evidence that she had thought at all about these and a great many other subjects.

Palin's candidacy shows the limits of populism, and in recognizing this I am putting myself on the side of the elitists. Running the government really does require knowing something about policy.

Numbers USA

New to the blogroll is Numbers USA, an activist website wherein you can obtain information and e-alerts on immigration-related legislation and generate free faxes to your congressional delegation on immigration issues.

The site is by no means perfect. For instance, while of course seeking a reduction in immigration and opposing any amnesty, Numbers USA's style comes off as squishy and moderate. In its eagerness to avoid looking "racist" (and you know it will be called racist anyway), its talking points are quite vague about what the problems actually are. Further, it doesn't allow users to personalize the text of the faxes that will be sent on their behalf, but only pick from a menu of pre-written communiqués.

Still, Numbers USA is the only website that I've found that provides these services. As the only game in town, it is definitely worth signing up for.