Off-topic, but Alamogordo is a beautiful area. Very close to the White Sands National Monument. If anyone is ever in that area, I'd recommend visiting.
I went there once a few years ago during the summer. It was brutally hot out and dry as hell, but the sand was so cool you could have sworn there was an ice-rink under it or something. Even weirder though, it hurt to stare directly at the sand for too long since it reflected sunlight so well. I expect that you could probably get snow-blindness from staring at it for too long.
It felt like being in a field of gritty snow inside of an oven.
Actually the test was closer Socorro and the small town of San Antonio, NM (birthplace of the Hilton dynasty.) It was on what is now White Sands Missile Range which is very close to Alamogordo, but there is a mountain range between the test site and Alamogordo. The blast was visible from San Antonio though.
I would add that Alamogordo was the fictitious location of the giant ants in the film "Them!"
They open it once a year but you can see the site as you drive by. Very close to the outskirts Socorro, although WSMR is so large it covers both sides of the range if I'm not mistaken.
When i was younger and trying to educate myself into a higher class, I read a couple of his books. The only good one was From Beirut to Jerusalem, which was published in 1989. Everything after that was just crappy analogies.
I really don't understand how an "expert" in Middle East affairs could think that the USA going to war in Iraq was a good idea.
Although I do enjoy the Economist's coverage of subjects like Africa, EU politics, book reviews, and obituaries, I find their coverage of American politics to sometimes be very sub-par. A couple of examples:
- Endless war-mongering. They pushed heavily for the disastrous war in Iraq. After the Boston bombing, they asked whether America was getting complacent. They post a lot of stuff implying that America should go to war in Syria.
- Their coverage of American presidential politics is horrible. In 2000, they endorsed George W Bush, a political scion who was clearly an anti-intellectual and bit of a fool, over Al Gore, a visionary vice president who had co-presided over the longest economic expansion in American history. In 2004, after 4 disastrous years, their "endorsement" issue was titled "Incompetent vs Incoherent".
This stuff, especially the war-mongering, has made me care a lot less about the Economist than I did when I was, say, 18. Given that SV is a very forward-looking place, it is unsurprising that the Economist is less respected than it is in many other locales.
In the case of the economist, it's pretty jarring to see a magazine normally full of facts and figures turn into a political hack job when it comes to covering US politics.
Bush comes into office with a balanced budget and a recession, passes a really big tax cut that brings us into deficits, they applaud. Passes an expensive an inefficient medicare expansion, they're silent.
Obama comes into office with a trillion dollar deficit and a near-depression on his hands, passes tax cuts and a stimulus bill while attacking healthcare costs, and he's "presiding over a spending problem". Nevermind that he's been cutting discretionary spending since 2010.
It's not that their biases don't align with mine -- it's that their biases are so transparently hacky that it destroys any credibility the rest of the magazine has.
Sure, there was a recession, which I alluded to, and other stuff, well, I was working with a few sentences, not a book.
The CBO graded obamacare as reducing medicare costs (the biggest driver of our budget deficits). Expanding coverage should have a positive impact on costs, too. But I agree that expanding coverage was at least as important the bill's authors.
I wasn't trying to oversimplify the situation more than is necessary for a few sentence summary -- and people could disagree with my characterization. The coverage towards each president from the Economist is enlightening though, especially when you divorce it from policy or compare their coverage of similar policies from both administrations. That's where the hackiness comes in.
When it comes to things like immigration or international pipelines, you can easily tell the difference because only one those laws will actually have force.
I think a lot of American craziness stems from 3 factors:
- America is a geographically enormous country, so it's pretty easy to get away from reality and cling to your views (the rural vs. urban divide).
- A rapidly changing ethnic composition in a country with a history of slavery. Civil rights abuses are in many ways still active and ongoing (see all the gerrymandering).
- Several generations of people were inundated with Cold War propaganda.
