George Hahn

The reason the Artemis II story is so much more compelling is not the script, but the actors.

The crew fits a decent definition of an aspirational vision for masculinity, a wonderful attribute not sequestered to people born as male.

These impressive people are optimizing for service versus attention.

This story is a welcome reminder to those whose lived experiences are shaped by forever wars, financial crises, pandemics, and an insurrection that America is still capable of moonshots, still capable of going where no person has gone before, still capable.

We aren't going back.

We're going farther.

When you compress the carotid arteries, you cut off the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain.

This causes unconsciousness in approximately 8 to 15 seconds due to cerebral hypoxia, oxygen deprivation to the brain.

Globalization has expanded the economic corpus, resulting in an interconnected world and yielding huge, though unevenly distributed, prosperity.

It has also formed carotid arteries the size of, wait for it, the Strait of Hormuz.

In 1984, a forgettable made-for-TV movie contemplated a Middle East conflict that closed the Strait of Hormuz.

For decades, U.S.

strategic simulations have explored similar scenarios.

In one 2002 war game, the Red Team, deploying asymmetrical capabilities including armed speedboats, decimated American naval forces in 10 minutes, effectively closing the strait.

Why didn't the Trump administration anticipate this entirely predictable scenario?

A. Despite a warning from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president determined that the regime would capitulate before closing the strait, and that if it didn't, the U.S.

military could reopen it.

He was wrong.

This may be the greatest intelligence failure since CIA Director George Tenet famously told Bush it was a slam-dunk case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

But let's put aside the choke point almost everyone saw coming and discuss some others we choose to ignore.