Not an auspicious beginning

Uuuurrrggghhhh...

To say that you humble webmaster is not at his best would be quite the understatement. I can't remember the last time I was this sick. I'll spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say there's more laundry than usual to be done in the Garret household tonight.

The first post is always the hardest because there's so much to to talk about, and it's hard to decide where to start. I see my role as webmaster to be a moderator, not to make this blog my own (I have my own blog for that). So I am going to try to leave my biases at the door, but I'm sure I will not always succeed. So thought I'd start by being really up-front about what some of my biases are.

My ancestors are German Jews. My grandparents' generation all fled from Germany to what was then Palestine in the early to mid thirties. It was still Palestine when my parents were born. They moved back to Germany in the early 60's, and my sister and I were both born there. We emigrated to Lexington, Kentucky, in the fall of 1969, when I was 5. So depending on how you count, I'm an American, a German, an Israeli and a Palestinian.

I moved to Glendale in 1988 to work at JPL, and I've been bouncing around the Glendale-Pasadena area ever since. My wife Nancy and I moved to La Canada in June of 2005, and we love it here. There's not a day goes by that I don't wake up and think how lucky I am to be able to live here.

I believe in freedom. That may sound like a platitude, and one of my biggest fears is that it is becoming one. Because of my family history I am keenly aware of how easy it is for a society to run off its rails. Adolf Hitler is today the very paragon of evil, so it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it was not always so. Hitler was democratically elected, and enjoyed widespread popular support among the German people, and even among some Americans. Before there was the Third Reich there was the Weimar Republic staggering under the weight of war reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was poor and weak. Inflation at its worst ran at a rate so high it could barely be calculated, vastly worse than what is going on in Zimbabwe today.

Hitler rose to power on a promise of restoring Germany to its former strength and making the country secure from stealthy enemies. Substitute the word "terrorist" for "Jew" and there are eerie parallels between Germany of 1933 and America today. Now as then a disturbingly large (to me) number of people were willing to accept an increased level of government intrusion into their lives in exchange for "security". (I put the word in scare quotes because of course they were really not buying security at all, but only the temporary the illusion of security, which to my mind makes it an especially bad bargain.)

I've been strongly hinting at a certain amount of displeasure with the Bush administration, but make no mistake: I'm not a big fan of the Democrats either. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have become little more than lap dogs for the Administration. And even discounting the hysteria surrounding the so-called war on terror, Democrats are more than willing to restrict my freedoms in other ways. Gun control, for example, is plainly unconstitutional. I believe gun control would be a fine idea, but once you decide that the ends justify the means then it's very hard to close the resulting Pandora's box. If you want to pass gun control you have to amend the Constitution first. It's the mutual willingness on both the left and the right to do end-runs around the Constitution that has led to the evisceration of the Ninth Amendment. (Quick, do you even know what the Ninth Amendment says without looking it up?)

And I really wish they'd finish paving the top of Alta Canyada boulevard.

Ordinarily I'd go back and polish this to make it a little more coherent, but my body is staging a protest march and it's about to get ugly. So I'll have to leave it at that for now.