Armistice

An Armistice is derived, according to Wikipedia from the Latin arma (Weapons) and stitium (stopping .) Wikipedia defines Armistice Day as the anniversary of the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, officially ending World War I. Peace broke out on the "11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month."

About six months later, according to Wikipedia, the Treaty of Versailles formalized Germany's World War I surrender. The Treaty forced Germany to accept full responsibility for the war, and reparations were required. Essentially, the winning Allies, including the United States, found the entire population of Germany guilty of war crimes.

Historian Wolfgang Mommsen of the University of Düsseldorf, was quoted in the PBS series, The Great War.

"The Treaty of Versailles created a political climate in Germany in which the right put all the blame on everything that went sour, onto the Treaty and the lost war. And that created this climate in which many people then began to think one had to fight the war once again.

"Hitler sold the Second World War to the Germans as righting the wrongs of Versailles," according to Mommsen. Stopping the weapons again produced a whole new crop of war criminals. Instead of blaming the entire German nation, however, the winning Allies, including the United States, assigned war guilt to individuals found guilty at places like Nuremberg.

The Nuremberg Trials were an effort to preemptively stop the weapons of war. Julius Streicher, (pictured above) was one of the Germans found guilty and executed by the Allies, including the United States. Part of Streicher's unsuccessful defense was that some international treaty law didn't apply to the axis powers because they were not signatories.

As of today, unfortunately, there is no armistice and the weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan have not yet been stopped. According to Time, charges against the outgoing United States Defense Secretary and other officials will soon be filed in a German court. The article noted that the Bush Administration rejected adherence to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Marjorie Cohn, wrote in the Jurist, that even though Bush "...immunized his team from prosecution in the International Criminal Court, they could be tried in any country under the well-established principle of universal jurisdiction."

"Nearly 3,000 American soldiers and more than 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died and tens of thousands have been wounded. Our national debt has skyrocketed with the billions Bush has pumped into the war. Now that there is a new day in Congress, there must be a new push to end the war. That means a demand that Congress cut off its funds," Cohn said.

Waking up

All across the country, people are waking up on the day after the 2006 midterm elections. Some people feel that they are waking up from a long nightmare. Other may perceive today's new political reality as the real nightmare.

President Bush observed today that the "...people have spoken."

The Department of Defense is getting a new leader.

The House of Representatives has a new majority, and a new majority leader.

The winning political campaign 2006 strategy: not being a Republican. Some candidates, in fact, seem to have taken that strategy to extremes. Democrats, however, now face a new nightmare reality -- they must assume leadership.

Not being a Republican will probably not be a winning political strategy for Election 2008. So, what is the leadership plan? Comedian Lewis Black said "...You see, in our two-party system, the Democrats are the party of no ideas and the Republicans are the party of bad ideas...."

Congressional leadership could choose to reject bad ideas and no ideas-- self-evident ideas occasionally make legislative history. The ink is faded, as you can see in the photo above, but the words still live as working political convictions of every individual human.

We have tried to finish the Iraq war with bad ideas or no ideas - the self-evident answer is still an option. It is self-evident that every individual citizen of Iraq (like the United States) possesses individual rights . To secure these rights, every individual citizen of Iraq (as well as the United States) creates and submits to a government of their own choosing. It is the right of every individual citizen of Iraq (not the United States) to alter or abolish the government they create to secure their own individual rights.

According to CNN, 71% of Iraqis responding to a survey by the University of Maryland favor a commitment by US-led forces in Iraq to withdraw within a year.

Launch

BBC reports SpaceLoft XL lifted off from Spaceport America in New Mexico, on Monday. Moments later it veered off course and crashed. (Hopefully, this is not prophetic for this blog's first posting.)

According to the Aero-News Network, however, there is good news. Launch Logistics coordinator Tracey Larsen said it's possible at least some of the payload survived intact. She is quoted in the article as observing, "...If it was easy, everyone would be doing it...."

The next scheduled launch is for October 21, according to Aero-News. Part of the payload scheduled for that flight will include the ashes of several celebrities (Mercury Astronaut Gordon Cooper and James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek.)

The October flight is called the Legacy Flight by Celestis, a company of Space Services Inc., or SSI. The company says that remains will be returned to family or loved ones as a keepsake commemorating a final voyage to outer space.

Time Magazine featured SSI's first successful flight - Conestoga I, almost 24 years ago. In an article posted September 20, 1982 another Mercury astronaut, Donald ("Deke") Slayton, who was Conestoga's flight director said "...We didn't have a single anomaly in flight."

Less than six months after Conestoga's flight, Slayton chaired the first "Private Enterprise in Space" panel at the 25th Space Congress in Cocoa Beach, FL. Seven of the first companies involved in that infant industry presented research. One of those research papers (Orbital Economics: Engineering Growth) was presented by this blog's author. Legacy is an important theme for this blog.

Obviously, another important theme for a blog named So Much for Small Talk will be Exploration - as well as Growth. The conclusion of that paper, over 20 years ago, was (and is) that "...there is a future for growth."