OK, I keep hearing these reports about Al Qaeda types claiming that they will treat western prisoners like their “Iraqi brothers” in Abu Ghraib.
So, what are they going to do? Make them j3rk off while wearing womens’ underthings on their heads? Somehow, it doesn’t seem like them…
If true, here’s a non-war reason to hope for a Bush reelection. Reagan could never do this, but he never had a Republican congress.
I should add that people are paying far too much attention to polls, including the approval ratings and “right-track/wrong-track” polls. It’s way too early for them to have any significance whatsoever. The campaign hasn’t even started yet, and it won’t really kick in until after the Republican convention, and not really until after Labor Day.
At this point in 1988, Dukakis was several points ahead of the president’s father, and stayed there through August. He barely got over a hundred electoral votes.
I don’t think this race is going to be close–certainly not as close as 2000 (if for no other reason than regression to the mean). It’s very unlikely that we’d have two elections so close consecutively.
I in fact think that it will be a landslide, one way or the other (and my money’s on Bush, or would be if I participated in the Iowa electronic futures market, which currently agrees with me).
The Israelis appear to finally have a video confirming what they’ve long accused the Red Cross of–sheltering terrorists in ambulances. Confronted with the evidence, they apparently admitted that there were terrorists in the ambulance, but claimed that it had been hijacked. But as Fox pointed out, the driver never complained. Not, that is, until the video was released.
How much longer are we going to grant moral authority to the increasingly-obviously-corrupt UN, and the ICRC?
Jeff Foust points out another article on the upcoming commission report over at AP. As Jeff points out:
The article also notes that “some experts have said President Bush’s goals could ultimately cost $1 trillion,” citing Douglas Osheroff, the Stanford physicist and CAIB member. Perhaps that shows that even Nobel laureates can be lousy cost estimators
Jeff Foust points out another article on the upcoming commission report over at AP. As Jeff points out:
The article also notes that “some experts have said President Bush’s goals could ultimately cost $1 trillion,” citing Douglas Osheroff, the Stanford physicist and CAIB member. Perhaps that shows that even Nobel laureates can be lousy cost estimators
Jeff Foust points out another article on the upcoming commission report over at AP. As Jeff points out:
The article also notes that “some experts have said President Bush’s goals could ultimately cost $1 trillion,” citing Douglas Osheroff, the Stanford physicist and CAIB member. Perhaps that shows that even Nobel laureates can be lousy cost estimators
Here is a compilation of what some people would like to see in the Great Prevaricator’s book, when it’s released next week. I have lots of these myself, but here’s one that no one else mentioned:
Will he deny the rape charge? Will he call Juanita Broderick a liar?
He’s never had a comment on this–whenever asked, he has simply said to talk to his lawyer. His lawyer denies it, of course, but that’s meaningless since he has no knowledge.
Brian Berger has apparently gotten an early look at the Aldridge Commission report, now scheduled to be publicly released Wednesday.
It has some encouraging things, but there are also some areas of concern.
It says that NASA should rely on the private sector for transportation to LEO, which is good, but it also excludes human transportation from that, which is an implicit go-ahead for the Crew Exploration Vehicle on an expensive expendable. I find this program almost as economically senseless as the Orbital Space Plane was, if envisioned as a Shuttle replacement (a role that many are urging for it), but apparently there’s too much political pressure to build such a thing to kill it off completely.
I think that NASA is setting itself up for embarrassment a decade from now when their vaunted “Crew Exploration Vehicle” ends up costing hundreds of millions of dollars per flight while there are regular space tourism flights to orbit costing a couple of orders of magnitude less. By giving NASA permission to ignore the private sector for passenger services, the commission is simply putting off further the day that it will become a reality.
The other concern is this:
The commission also identified 17 enabling technologies needed to accomplish the exploration goals. These include an affordable heavy lift capability, advanced power and propulsion, automated spacecraft rendezvous and docking capability, high bandwidth communications, closed loop life supports systems, better spacesuits for astronauts and others.
“Affordable heavy lift capability” is not a technology, and its certainly not an enabling one. At best, to the degree that it’s a technology at all, it’s an enhancing one. “Enabling” implies that we can’t do without it. I absolutely reject the notion that it is essential, and if we believe that it is, it will simply hold us back in schedule while we wait for it to appear, and we will miss a lot of opportunities for innovation.
This heavy-lift fetish is going to be (or at least should be) one of the major space policy debate issues, because it is a hingepoint for the direction of our near-term future.
The New York Times has an article on SpaceShipOne today. It’s a good piece, though it doesn’t talk much about the potential for the suborbital flight industry. My biggest issue with it is a subtle one–it appears in the Science section. There’s nothing in the article about science, but it just shows how inextricable the perceived relationship is between space and science in the public mind (including New York Times reporters). Now that we’re starting to get accurate stories about this, the next step is to get them where they belong–in the Business sections.