Horizon Zero

The Lone And Level Snows

This is just one of several amazing photos of Buzludzha - a Bulgarian monument to Communism and the Communist Party constructed in the late 1970s and fully completed in 1981 - a mere eight years before world communism collapsed under the weight of its own ideology.

Did the architects and workers imagine that they'd built a monument that would be treasured for a thousand years? Did any of them - perhaps in jest - say to themselves, "look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair"?

Terraforming Terra - Atlantropa

I'm a fan of impossible mega-projects. Atlantropa, a massive engineering project conceived in the 1920s, certainly qualifies.

The plan called for a series of massive dams to restrict the flow of water from the Atlantic Ocean and the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, which would result in a gradual drop in the Med and result in the addition of over 250,000 square miles of new land. The major dams would serve to generate electricity and irrigation would turn North Africa into a new breadbasket.

It wasn't all rainbows and unicorns, however. The project was a child of its time - Central Africa would have to be flooded for it to work, but then at least it would finally "prove useful". Dropping the sea level would mean destroying ecosystems and ruining the economies of current day ports.

And it would be prohibitively expensive, to boot.

The concept has appeared a few times in fiction. As the article points out, Gene Roddenberry eluded to it in his novelization of the first Star Trek movie. And the Mediterranean Basin as dry land appears in Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch and again in Dan Simmon's Illium/Olympos duology.

Happy Birthday To The Army

The United States Army was founded 235 years ago today.

To celebrate, the order to ditch the beret came out today.

1989

Great year, or Greatest Year?

For Those Of You That Enjoy A Little History With Your Alcohol

The History Of The World... of Warcraft

Not just World of Warcraft, either. All Your Base Are Belong To Us is the title of a new book chronicling the first fifty years of video games and how they have changed popular culture.

You have to stretch things to get fifty full years, but 1961 DID see the creation of Spacewar! at MIT, so it's a fair cop.

The Looming Budget Showdown

I say bring it. The '95 shutdown didn't kill us. It wasn't very popular, but I think the public is more open to the idea now. And the Repubs have done a much better job of framing things this time around - the Dems are viewed as being obstructionists. (Well, by a plurality, at least.)

How to tame the budget beast? I've a few ideas, but no one is going to like them all.

It probably is time to pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq because the job is as done as we're going to get it with the current leadership, and Afghanistan because it seems like the only way to 'win' there would be to kill everyone.

And we probably shouldn't have started with Libya. Knocking off Ghadafi is something I can get behind, but we're not even really doing that. It's a mess of a mission and we shouldn't have started unless we knew exactly what our goals were.

So anyway, I'd pull the plug on all three of those extended ops. I'd home port one carrier group on each coast (cheaper that way) and put two in the Pacific, one in the Red Sea and one in the Med. I'd cut construction on the new carrier class. I'd actually buy more fighters since we seem committed to going back to the 'air power over all' mentality again and I'd rather have more airframes with fewer mission hours than the reverse. Maintenance gets costly and stress and mistakes kill.

Domestically, I'd tell everyone 35 and under that they can forget about ever seeing a dime of their Social Security. We'll cover everyone above that, because it's not their fault they got lied to - beyond the fact that they probably voted for the liars, that is. Yes, that does mean that my generation and those behind me will likely experience a stagnant or even declining standard of living compared to the Boomers, but someone has to bite the bullet and We're The Ones We've Been Waiting For. If you must have your cross-generational conflict, feel free to snub your elders when they get shunted off into ObamaCare group nursing homes or whatever.

Of course, having proposed this, I'd get labeled a monster. If I managed to get it passed into law, I'd probably get shot. We're in the mess we're in because we don't want to do what needs to be done. I don't see that changing just yet, unfortunately.

But hey, turn off the lights in DC for a few days - maybe people will get serious.

PS: If you have 10 minutes to spare, this is worth watching if you've ever wondered what we'd get if we actually decided to eat the rich.

A Disquiet Follows My Soul

I noticed last night that Netflix has Ken Burns' The Civil War series available as an On Demand choice until April 15th, so I queued up the first episode as a test of my 360's streaming connection. It's an older film, definitely not HD quality, and it worked just fine with nary a hiccup.

I was in junior high when the miniseries aired for the first time on PBS, and it played constantly for the next few years - first as part of the annual OETA fund raising season, then later on Lawton Public Schools' very own cable channel. But it's been more than a decade since I last got a chance to sit down and watch.

I was kind of surprised by how much watching the first episode affected me.

Maybe it's the passage of time, smoothing off my pointed, callow edges. Or maybe I'm going soft.

Or maybe I see far too much of our own times reflected in the days just before secession and Sumter for comfort.

Don't think it could never happen again. Too many people thought it could never happen at all.

Good News! World War One Is Finally Over!

Or it will be on Sunday.

Ninety-two years after the last shot was fired, Germany's final reparations payment will be made - officially ending the First World War.

I remember an apocryphal tale about how the tiny principality of Andorra wasn't invited to Versailles for the Treaty negotiations and remained officially at war with Germany until 1939, when Germany finally signed a peace treaty with them - 24 days after World War II started.

History abounds with irony.

Today in History

Today is Constitution Day, commemorating the 220th Anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.

Also, today marks the 70th Anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland.

Which made it a particularly crappy day to announce that the US is scrappingthe proposed Eastern European missile defense shield. If you're Polish. I imagine the Russians feel pretty good about it.