Eurotrip v2.0, Vol I

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 16:57:06 -0800

Hey guys,

So we arrived in London on Thursday. The exchange rate is killing us. Most meals cost around $10 just for a sandwich and a drink. The hostel we're staying at is great and Abe and I have made a lot of great friends. There's a little gang of us that meet up every night at the in-house bar for the cheapest Guinness in town. Abe and I have spent most of our time just walking the city, shooting pictures, and visiting interesting places. Who ever heard of the Statue of All Physical Energy? We also saw a play tonight at Westminster.

London's been so gray and wet that most of my pictures have come out very dull, but I finally got some good ones taken at dawn and dusk today that came out very nice. I've been photoshopping them on Dad's laptop at night when things settle down.

My biggest complaint is that their are too many Americans... we're everywhere! The hostel is 80% American (with half of them being from Wisconsin and Minnesota) and the uptown area's are very touristy. Honestly, London feels much more American than European. Maybe it's because the language barrier is broken and that sense of alienation isn't as pervasive, but a lot of my expectations built during my summer 2001 trip were a miss.

Sadly, not everyone will be getting post cards. I brought 18 postcards to a register and asked for stamps, and I was asked for £18 - roughly $40. I bought half that many - priority will be given to those who have sent me postcards in the past :-)

Much love,
Trey Menefee

PS - Feel free to forward this out to friends and family that I missed (i'm working off an old email list)


Tags: Treyopia Europe Travel London

Sanctity

President Bush decided recently that he would support a Constitutional ban on gay marriage. It would seem then that Karl Rove is positioning the topic of homosexual rights to the front of the agenda, where Republicans have popular support on their stance. This is tragic in both how it reflects on our society and our Constitution grounding.

Homosexuals have become the scapegoat for all that is wrong in American society. Societies outrage at young sexual exploration, teen pregnancy, high divorce rates, and the homogenization of sociopathic and destructive tendencies in our youth are channeled at the loudest group urging for a loosening of societal norms. Somehow, it is felt, that if only gays were banned from making legally binding lifelong commitments to their significant others, then straight couples would learn to work together in the best interest of their family in their own marriages! Besides, Britney Spears getting married during a Vegas weekend made a better case for allowing gay marriage than any pride parade ever could have.

Though loosening popular norms might be part of the equation for the general decay in the social fabric of our nation, there is more. Perhaps it is the rigged individualism preached in our society as the pillar of all that is American. Think about it, our entire economic system is based on the premise that if everyone just acts autonomously in their own self-interest all of the time somehow society is elevated. Thinking this at least eight hours a day must lead to some bleeding through into our social interactions.

The other problem is the sanctity of our Constitution. The Constitution, with one bad example of prohibition, has always been a granter of the people’s rights rather than a denier. Denying rights based on sexual identity has not place in the same document that enshrines my freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly.

It worries me that perhaps we do not take our Constitution as seriously as we used to. We are continuing to see the erosion of the right to bear arms and simple civil liberties like habeas corpus and right to trial have been revoked for US citizens with the wrong friends. Constitutional amendments banning rights to US citizens have no place in this years campaign guide.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Gay Marriage Constitution Bush Amendment

The Fog of War

_____ Fog of War ____

Events in Iraq are unfolding the same way they have been for almost a year – dizzying yet familiar in that nothing is a surprising anymore. Though the headlines are fading, but the fog of war has yet to lift from this ancient land. American troops are still dying at a rate of about one a day, which is a bit lower than it was over the summer before the Army devised tactics to counter urban ambushes and the infamous “improvised explosives.” Helicopters are now flying more erratic routes to avoid surface-to-air missiles. Though the death of any man is tragic, this is not what should worry us. What should worry us is the growing prospect of civil war in Iraq – and that’s seems precisely the aim of the insurgents.

Because American targets are becoming harder to hit, the new Iraqi police have become cannon fodder to the nihilistic insurgents. In one week in February, at least 150 Iraqi police died in car bombings. The intent is clear: minimize the raw numbers and morale of the American proxies once sovereignty is allegedly restored this July and troops begin pulling out of urban areas.

Once we begin urban withdrawal, these men will be doing our bidding on the streets of Baghdad – fighting terrorist and crooks alike. These men will be the protectors of the Governing Council; American GI’s will try to act only as backup. It would seem the larger strategy is to force an American withdrawal under fire. They intend to do this by sucking us back into the cities or to become actors in a civil war to play the part of the neo-colonialist that never intends to leave. We cannot win with that role.

Let us not forget the historical example Al Qaeda & Co. intends to follow – the Mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan. There they patiently brought a superpower to its knees and sparked the collapse of an entire empire. That was on the Soviet’s own border, we are half a world away. This prospect should scare Republicans and Democrats, friend and French alike. It is time that both parties put resources and minds together to create a serious but flexible exit strategy from Iraq.

We must not overreact and play into their plans, but we must not retreat because we are under fire. By reacting the way they want us to, staying because they are still violent, we are playing into their plans. This is precisely the endless conundrum the Israeli's are in. If American GI’s are still patrolling the streets of Baghdad two years from now, we will have lost this battle in the Terror Wars. If American GI’s are still patrolling the streets of Baghdad five years from now, we will have already lost the War.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Bush Iraq Quagmire Terrorism

Spacemen

-- New Spinnaker Column --

This month President Bush announced ambitious, and ambiguous, plans to return man to his rightful throne of discovery. After falling astray for the past two decades with the Shuttle program it’s about time NASA is given a new mandate. America needs to see, as we did 30 years ago when man first landed on the moon, how much we can accomplish as a people that we cannot do us individuals.

The problem with the Shuttle was that it was always a problem looking for a solution. It wasn’t practical in any meaningful sense. It was only huge and costly. It was built around the idea that by factoring in economies of scale, the shuttle would quickly pay for itself making bi-weekly deliveries of satellites and/or people into space. This is why it was designed to be reusable. It turns out those giant Saturn V rockets that sent man to the moon and later delivered a space-station in one load was cheaper.

To justify the existential problem of the Shuttle at the end of the Cold War, NASA resurrected the idea of a giant multi-national space station. This idea has come to fruition with the nearly complete but totally useless International Space Station (ISS), the only real purpose of which is to keep the Shuttle useful for another decade. Now, we learn that Hubble is going to be left for dead because NASA needs to complete ISS before the Shuttle retires in 2008.

There are at least two alternative views to Bush’s vision of where we should go from here. One undercurrent with rising popularity is that we abandon space programs all together, considering that these two NASA rovers cost us half a billion dollars to build and land rovers 300 million miles away from the problems here on Earth. The problem with this approach is that it relies on a perfectionist fallacy, where we must tie our hands behind our backs and do nothing outside of the physical boundaries of our nation until every internal problem is fixed.

Another emerging view is that we stop government-funded manned exploration all together, allowing robots to do the scientific work and allow the free market, via space tourism, to build an affordable gateway to the stars in a way that NASA has not. This is exemplified through a $10m contest called the X-Prize. In the spirit of the contests that jumpstarted aviation, investors are hoping that entrepreneurs and backyard engineers will be able to build the first commercially viable manned vehicle capable of leaving Earth’s atmosphere, taking at least two millionaire tourist up with them.

As with most cases, private enterprise and government programs can co-exist peaceably together so long as the government gets out of the tourism business as soon as someone claims that X-Prize. The government must learn its lesson from the Shuttle, however, and have a clear plan for the manned space program so that we never again have to loose valuable scientific tools like Hubble for pointless projects like the ISS has become.


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Bush, space moon mars shuttle NASA hubble HST