THE SARGE looks at old training photos and sees the future: his own. Dilbert isn’t just in the corporate world.

I must’ve re-watched that particular module 3 or 4 times, trying to catch everyone else I knew. It was amazing to see these guys when they were fresh-faced youngsters just out of high school. You could see actual hints of happiness in their eyes coupled with the intense look of determination in their sharp, toned faces. I was being given a rare gift: The chance to see my supervisors before too much beer and bullshit took their toll on them. The young men in the pictures weren’t the scared, dreary and doughy men that I knew and worked for. I could relate to the men in the pictures, but not the guys I saw everyday that had been broken down by the system.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was also being given a glimpse of my own future. I was too busy making fun of the old pictures to realize that my future was staring me right in the face when I looked at them in the flesh 12 years later. The happiness and life in their eyes was replaced with resignation and defeat. They were eyes that had seen too much shit and just didn’t give a damn anymore. There was no hope, no zeal. Just a look of wanting to get shit done with a minimal amount of BS so they could go home, spend time with their families and look forward to retirement. It’s a face I’m all too familiar with nowadays. I see it every day in the mirror.

On the other hand, I remember once when I was a pretty new professor, asking another guy about some of our nearly-retired “deadwood” colleagues. “Do you think they expected to end up that way?” I asked. “Are you kidding?” was the response. “They planned to end up that way.”

JOHN WEIDNER weighs in in favor of space colonization. That’s going to be the topic (well, sort of) of my next FoxNews column, too.

“ARE YOU AN AMERICAN, OR A JOURNALIST?” That’s the question asked by journalists and examined over at Media Minded.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE ON BIOTERRORISM, focusing on deterrence, not just amelioration.

AIRLINE PILOTS WANT PILOTS ARMED. The public wants pilots armed. Norm Mineta doesn’t want pilots armed. The Wall Street Journal asks why not:

The objections expressed by the Administration are weak. “I don’t feel we should have lethal weapons in the cockpit,” says Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who also insists that grandmothers be screened at airports with the same intensity as suspicious-looking young men. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge adds, “Where do you stop? If pilots carry guns [then] railroad engineers and bus drivers could ask to do the same.”

The response seems obvious: Control of a cockpit can turn an airliner into a lethal weapon. Hijacked trains and buses can’t be flown into the Pentagon or a nuclear plant.

I trust airline pilots — and for that matter airline passengers — to protect me far more than I do underperformin’ Norman Mineta, or Tom Ridge.

Politically, of course, this is a very risky move for Mineta. If another airplane is hijacked — or even if there’s an attempt in which passengers or crew are killed before the meticulously-disarmed passengers are able to subdue the hijackers — Mineta and Ridge will be crucified on this. At least figuratively — and there’ll be some folks who’ll want to make the figurative literal.

RON BAILEY reports from this past weekend’s Foresight Institute conference on nanotechnology. I agree with Ray Kurzweil in terms of hopes, but with Leon Fuerth in terms of fears.

JONAH GOLDBERG has some unkind words for the European Street:

Indeed, Europe’s problems with Israel and America can be boiled down to these two attributes: guilt and arrogance.

The Europeans, as we all know, are now the backseat drivers of history. They had their hands on the wheel for a very long time, and the world is better off for it — an assertion which is, sadly, politically incorrect on both sides of the Atlantic, but no less obviously true for being so. Were it not for European civilization leading the way for much of the last thousand years, humanity would be in a ditch. To suggest otherwise is to dabble in fantasy.

But, around the middle of the last century, the Europeans got lost and America had to get into the driver’s seat. This was very embarrassing for the Euros because, after all, they’d driven us around for years, treating us like we were a little brother they’d gotten stuck chauffeuring to Little League games. (The fact that the driver traditionally gets to decide which radio stations everyone listens to and which drive-thrus to stop at particularly rankles with Europeans who hate American culture.)

Read the whole thing. It’s excellent.

JOURNALISTS WITHOUT A CLUE: An apparently endlessly continuing series. The Dallas Morning News is threatening to sue a site called Barkingdogs.org unless it quits linking to individual articles and starts linking only to the paper’s front page.

First, this sort of linking has been upheld repeatedly, and it’s key to the operation of the web.

Second, have you seen the lame, hard-to-navigate front page of the Dallas Morning News site? What do they think they’d be accomplishing — except to turn people off — by forcing everyone to go there first and then hunt for the story? Do they think that most readers will read the headline story “Plant Fire Near Houston Forces Evacuations” when they’ve actually come to the site to read “Church Takes the Lead in Head Start Projects”?

Next they’ll want to force you to read all the ads in section one before you’re allowed to turn to the sports page.

UPDATE: Reader D.F. Hawbaker writes from Dallas:

As a Dallas resident, you are so right about the DMN’s website. As with everything else in this city, they think they are God’s gift to journalism, the web, the world! It’s made worse by being the only newspaper in town. DMN has always had one of the lamest websites, but their egos refuse to get out of the way of improvement.

Write ’em and tell ’em. Personally, I think the commenter on Alice’s page is right: this hurts them more than it hurts us, since it costs them pageviews.

THE NEW YORK SUN GETS A MIXED REVIEW from Joe Bob Briggs, forwarded by reader Eric Akawie. Since when did Briggs leave his double-wide outside Dallas and move to Manhattan?

KASS COUNCIL KAPUT? My TechCentralStation column is up.

RABBIS ARE CALLING FOR A BOYCOTT OF THE NEW YORK TIMES because of its biased Israel coverage. Hmm. What a convenient time for a new New York daily paper to appear on the scene.

Say, the L.A. Times is facing similar complaints, and there’s a new Los Angeles daily paper in the works, too, with heavy involvement by anti-Idiotarians Matt Welch, Ken Layne, and Tim Blair.

DRIVE FARMERS OFF THEIR LAND and hand it over to your inept, corrupt political cronies. What do you get? Food shortages, growing into famine. Perhaps Kofi Annan should turn his attention to actual human rights abuses.

UPDATE: Amartya Sen wrote that famines don’t occur when you have a free press. Uh oh.

MINUTE PARTICULARS calls me magnanimous for linking to a list of Christian bloggers even though most of them disagree with me on cloning. I’ll take the praise, I guess, but it’s not like you have to agree with me to get a link.

I link to anything I find interesting. The growth of Christian blogging is interesting to me. So there.

NADER MATH: Dan Lewis responds to some figures by Ralph Nader in Slate’s “Breakfast Table” feature.

MICKEY KAUS wonders why everyone is still getting McCain/Feingold wrong.

CLONING UPDATE: Virginia Postrel has much more debunking material on the Kristol/Shrum ad campaign, and the subject of stem cell research and cloning in general. She also has a rare Camille Paglia sighting!

LAMAR ALEXANDER’S POLITICAL CAREER may be in trouble now that someone has pointed out his resemblance to Pat Boone.

THE GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH– a cultural universal?

HERE’S A HOMESCHOOL BLOG with an, er, insider’s view of the process.

DAVID NIEPORENT points out that Eugene Volokh has yet another accurate Supreme Court prediction to add to his record. Advantage: Volokh! And Nieropent, for pointing this out.

“VELVET CONSERVATISM” — An article on New York Sun and New Republic owner Roger Hertog from The American Prospect. I don’t know how accurate it is, since I know nothing about the guy, but it certainly seems fair.

The best quote in the piece, though, is from Sun Editor-in-Chief Seth Lipsky:

“The right wing of the Democratic Party,” Lipsky told me recently, “is a depressed stock.”

That’s certainly true, and God knows I hear it from Tennessee Democrats all the time.

WAS THE BACHELOR RIGGED? Alex Rubalcava says it was, and it looks like he’s got the goods.

THAT’S MISTER YUPPIE SCUM, TO YOU: According to this article, gentrification may be good for neighborhoods, and even for the poor people who live in them. The reduction in crime and improvement in amenities have something to do with it:

“Low-income households actually seem less likely to move from gentrifying neighborhoods than from other communities,” said a recent report by the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a New York nonprofit organization that analyzed demographic shifts in the city over the last few years.

If low-income residents remain in gentrifying areas, then they can enjoy the community improvement that gentrification generally brings. . . . “I really didn’t find any evidence that it did push poor people out,” Vigdor says of his study of demographic changes in gentrifying neighborhoods in Boston. “In fact I found a good amount of evidence that they’re more likely to stick around.”

Even though rents go up in gentrifying neighborhoods, Vigdor found long-term residents wanted to stay to enjoy the better environment for children, the increased local services, and the possibility of new jobs in the area.

“Basically you’ve got two factors,” says Braconi. “You’ve got rents maybe increasing — that makes it harder for poor people to stay — by the same token gentrification brings with it a lot of community improvement.”

Wow. Who’d’ve thought that poor people might actually benefit when their neighborhoods get better?

A WORD FOR OUR TIMES.

THIS POST BY RAMESH PONNURU over at The Corner is, as far as I know, the first use of the term “Idiotarian” by a professional journalist.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Hankamer writes: “Now if only there was an Idiotarian Party. I can see it now: ‘Vote Idiotarian – It’s Easier Than Thinking.'”

Actually, Mike, sometimes I think we have two of those.