I have a son-in-law who graduated from the Citadel.

The interstate highway speaks to the general he was. Being able to move troops takes a certain skill set. ;)

I'd always thought that "a dead man's town" in Springsteen was Philadelphia...

The problem is that the swift-boating wasn't honest. When people said they trusted an admitted deserter's characterization of service over an actual combat vet's, one has to wonder how those priorities got so skewed, the main answer to that being "if you do more, there's more for them to target". Thus veterans get extra negative attention for doing things they needed to do, causing a chilling effect on others that may have not quite healed as well as they'd like.

As for the Christian Conservatives being anti-military, buying a ribbon magnet from a third-party vendor is pretty much the nadir of anti-militarism when there's plenty of charities like the USO and Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society that could actually USE the money to aid the troops

Well, in fact I knew (and served with) quite a number pretty closely. 15 months in country. More than a couple with their names permanently etched in DC.

You?

Must not have known many military men. Sounds more like the average employee at mcdonalds. Or the Hollywood depiction of the military.

Must not have known many military men. Sounds more like the average employee at mcdonalds. Or the Hollywood depiction of the military.

Politics is not compatible wit an engineering career--nor their mind-set. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/14...

BTW Herbert Hoover was a mining engineer.

The military has always been an honorable career choice in the South. The Citadel in South Carolina carries as much prestige as the USMA at West Point.

plusaf, you make some good points, but I take a small exception to your nutshell description of engineering. In my career, the definition was much more 'to take pure science and develop applications of it to real world problems.' And in a majority of situations I found that it was very much my job to identify, determine and resolve problems in ways to fit the facts of a situation with logic and common sense. But I also stayed out of design rooms. I preferred the real world.

Chain of command, obeying orders, 'we're the good guys, so what we do is always right', etc.

I prefer men of the mind, with integrity and openness.

Thanks for the clarification. :)

In an oversimplified nutshell, engineers' jobs are to design, discover or identify solutions to whatever problems they're given.

They can and should evaluate a wide range of potential techniques or methods and choose the best one or ones to POTENTIALLY meet the challenge. Usually, then, someone else picks the 'best one' based on constraints of time, money, resources features and tradeoffs.

MY personal gripe on the subject is that I believe that the plethora of lawyers in nationally elected offices may have all the chops for writing laws and debating them but do NOT have anywhere near the mindset and training to do what I would call the rational, logical, critical thinking EVALUATION of alternatives BEFORE they 'choose the winning solution.'

e.g., 'Poverty is the problem! People don't have enough money! Give them money!'

And the general electorate, also not thinking like that, sends the lawmakers back into office with high regularity and then bitches at them with traditionally low approval ratings for Congress (in general.)

Just a tiny cognitive dissonance there that Woof Blister will never discuss in his Situation Room. Or Mr. 360 or anyone else. Especially voters or the mass media.

Engineers, of course, are human... well, most of us, I think... <humor> but can be easily thwarted by levels of management which take the 'engineering solutions' and modify or discard them based on Non-Critical Thinking or their own prejudices and not by rational evaluation of features, benefits and alternatives. Been there, seen that throughout 34 years with two technology companies, 1968-2002.

Many folks may argue that I'm wrong about these opinions and beliefs, but I've never had to go far in conversations to discover the resulting dissatisfaction or upset folks have because of this exact phenomenon.

I often call it "The Question Behind The Question," when congressmonkeys or local officials or mass media immediately debate the 'obvious solution' to whatever problem is articulated, without ANY effort to ask, "But WHY does THAT happen in the first place?!", which almost always BEGINS to lead us to discovery of the Real ROOT CAUSE of the 'problem.'

Teach that in schools and, though it'll still take some decades to 'cure it,' I believe that it's probably one of the only possible ways to reverse the trends of today (including many of the topics we discuss here!)

:)
Thanks, again!

Dems are always going to have the upper hand in urban settings. Urbanites need a connection of services to survive.

What did you think of Eisenhower?

It wasn’t a veiled attack. It was a joke. I have always wanted to know where the cornerstone was located. It was originally put in by Masons using a formal ceremony--but overtime, the location has been lost. I haven’t really given any thought to what an engineer could bring or not bring to the political arena.

What do you think?

I didn't notice any <humor> tags in that reply, Mimi, so I want to know if you really believe that 'cornerstone identification' would be pretty much all an engineer would bring to the party (ten inpunded...)? Were you joking, or do you really not know what's involved in 'engineering thinking or training'?

What is a "military mindset"?

Philly suburbs have elected quite a few vets recently all the while voting in Obama.

Kid: But you can't operate in this environment using such rigid principles.

Rearden: Try pouring a ton of steel without rigid principles. (or building a bridge, or making a huge metal object that successfully flies through the sky in one fell swoop)