Less than a week!

In less than a week, I'll be winging my way to Las Vegas aboard Korean Airlines. I've never flown KAL before, but people say it's a good airline with good service.

Unfortunately, every time I hear "KAL", I think of KAL 007 that was shot down over Sakhalin Island by the Soviets in 1983 when it wandered accidentally into Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers and crew perished. The claim was that they didn't know it was a civilian aircraft and evidence gathered over time showed that they had made no attempt to communicate with the airline. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that the accidental "off course theory" was no accident. "U.S. intelligence has a long history of 'tickling' Soviet radar' by deliberately flying planes into Soviet airspace and then recording the responses."

Well, at any rate, I'm not going to worry myself about such things. That was in 1983 when the Cold War was utmost in the minds of the Reagan administration. Now that the Soviet Union has fallen, we've transferred our paranoia to the terrorists. Doesn't it seem strange that every time we have a Republican administration everybody gets paranoid about something? I've heard that you create what you think. Makes me wonder if we're all thinking a little too much about "evil empires' and the "axis of evil" and creating more and more of it in the world. Maybe we should shift our thinking to better things and find peaceful solutions to the world's problems.