Transterrestrial Musings

More Idiocy From Abroad

Terror, terror, terror. Like a punctuation mark, the word infects every Israeli speech, every American speech, almost every newspaper article.

Yeah, kind of hard to think about other subjects with all those suicide bombers dissassembling themselves and those in their immediate environs every couple hours. Just what is it that we're supposed to discuss amidst the flying body parts?

When will someone admit the truth: that the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a dirty colonial war which will leave both sides shamed and humiliated?

We do admit that it's a colonial war, Bobby. It's an attempt by the Wahabbi empire to colonize Jewish Palestine, replacing its inhabitants with more lunatics.

Just listen to what Sharon has been saying in the past 24 hours. "Arafat is an enemy. He decided on a strategy of terror and formed a coalition of terror." That's pretty much what President Bush said about Osama bin Laden. But what on earth does it mean? That Arafat is actually sending off the suicide bombers, choosing the target, the amount of explosives?

Yes, that's right, Bob. [rolling eyes heavenward]

He's picking the targets, calculating the charge size, lovingly packing each bomb and attaching them to the strap, choosing the wardrobe, and kissing each Islamakazi's forehead as he sends him out to get his virgins. After all, if he's not doing all that, he can't be said to be responsible, right?

You know, it's just like when George Bush pores over relief maps of Afghanistan, calling in orders to the pilots as he watches via cockpit camera.

"No, not that hill--the one over there, to the right. Wait for it...wait for it...now!"

If he was, then surely Sharon would have sent his death squads after the Palestinian leader months ago. After all, his killers have managed to murder dozens of Palestinian gunmen already, including occasional women and children who get in the way.

His "death squads"? His "killers"?

Yes, he probably would, except that Mr. Powell has been holding him back. Though he may not be doing so any longer.

Now we have an Israeli officer ? according to the Israeli daily Ma'ariv ? advising his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis in the Second World War. "If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an (Israeli) officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even ? shocking though this might appear ? to analyse how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto."

Pardon? What on earth does this mean? Does this account for the numbers marked by the Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners earlier this month? Does this mean that an Israeli soldier is now to regard the Palestinians as sub-humans ? which is exactly how the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944?

Yes, I remember how those crazy Jews were strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them next to women and babies. It's in all the revisionist history books, doncha know?

No, Bob, it just means that they are looking to all historical instances of urban warfare for guidance as to the best tactics to win. They don't intend to lose. It doesn't mean that they're going to make the Palestinians into lampshades.

But now everyone is cashing in on the "war against terror". When Macedonian cops gun down seven Arabs, they announce that they are participating in the global "war on terror". When Russians massacre Chechens, they are now prosecuting the "war on terror". When Israel fires at Arafat's headquarters, it says it is participating in the "war on terror". Must we all be hijacked into America's dangerous self-absorption with the crimes of 11 September?

Yes, we are so dangerously self absorbed. We can't be bothered with sending brigades of philosophers to Afghanistan--all we can do is selfishly liberate it. Just what are we thinking, to want to prevent more terrorism at home, when we should instead be taking anger management courses?

I'm sorry, but this stuff just defies parody.

Must this vile war between Palestinians and Israelis be distorted in so dishonest a way?

Well, you're the expert, Bob. You tell us.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:55 PM

Osama bin Porkin'

Now we know why we haven't found him. The ever-reliable Weekly World News tells us that the slim, svelte Osama that we know and love is no more.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:30 AM

Who Moved My Cave?

Australian advice columnist Tim Blair has some self-helpful hints for terrorists, and terrorist wannabes.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:58 AM

Democracy Restored In The District

A federal judge has overturned an outrageous federal law that prevented DC residents from circulating petitions to legalize drugs in the district. I admired Bob Barr during the corruption battles of the nineties, but he is behaving despicably with regard to the Constitution in his insane War on (Some) Drugs.

Why just imagine what might happen if drugs were legalized in the District of Columbia. Thousands of people might use drugs. Why, even the mayor might start usi...

Oh. Never mind.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:06 AM

Stop Policeware

I haven't been beating on this drum much, but Instantman and others have been all over it. And fellow-blogger Dale Amon sends me the URL to the site that is fighting the incipient government takeover of our personal computers and DVDs.

Go thee out and sign the petition.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:42 AM

The Spin And Lies Continue

Now we have Krugman doing it.

The group's efforts managed to turn Whitewater ? a $200,000 money- losing investment ? into a byword for scandal, even though an eight-year, $73 million investigation never did find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons.

"never did find any evidence..."

It continually amazes me how these flying Clinton spinmonkeys are so blithe about their willful mendacity on the editorial pages. Now that lie will be sitting there in the archives of the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record in perpetuity. But they're shameless.

No, Paul. Now you're calling Mr. Ray a liar. He said himself on the teevee the other night that he had enough evidence to prosecute. He just chose not to. Prosecutor's discretion, you know...

I think that it's your pants catching on fire here...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:09 AM

March 28, 2002
Alterman Ego

Instantman points out a particularly odious and mindless piece by Eric Alterman (but you have to forgive him--after all, as Mark Twain once said about someone else of similar cerebral propensity, "I'd brain him, if he had the material for it") about the unfair balance between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian pundits.

He writes this as though it's some kind of Olympic ice-skating contest. As though we all know that there are no objective measures of morality, both sides should be assumed to be of equal weight on the ethics scale (and we certainly can't expect the judges themselves to be objective), so we have to at least make sure that we minimize the stacking of the deck so that both sides have equal punditry numbers and quality of spinning and support.

Well, Eric, I'll surprise you here. While roughly half of my ancestors are of Jewish descent (if I'm to believe the tales told to me in my childhood), I think that Israel sucks in multiple ways. It is a socialist nation. It can sustain such socialism only through the largess of American foreign aid and implicit defense. It is a religious state, that imposes unacceptable (to me) strictures on freedom. It continues to subsidize collectives called kibbutzim (though not as much as in years past) in a vain effort to sustain the socialist vision that led to its founding. It is a fractious country, unable to maintain a coherent policy because it is ruled by a multi-party parliamentarian system, derived from failed European models.

Oh, sorry. I know that someone like you considers all of this a compliment--not criticism, so what's a guy to do, Eric? When one can't even criticize the state of Israel without sounding like a defender of it to socialist journalists, is it surprising that your little enemies list is so skewed?

But the reality (yes, I know, a vile and unfamiliar concept to writers for The Nation) intrudes. I have to conclude that, for all its flaws, it's the only nation in that region of the world that has any hope of providing a glimmer of freedom and prosperity to its people, including its Arab citizens.

Israel occasionally kills some civilians accidentally in the process of hunting down cold-blooded murderers. Some Israelis even occasionally kill Palestinians deliberately, but when this occurs, they are brought to trial, and at least a semblance of justice.

Their enemies, on the other hand, vow that all Israelis must die. This is not just the rantings of a few hotheads, but the official policy of their governments (though it's usually spoken and written only in Arabic, for local consumption). They deliberately target civilians, including women, children, and even babes, in their maniacal hatred of Jews. They suck at the teat of the long-vanquished Nazis, and mourn their passing, and lust to finish the job that they once started. They deny a voice to their own people, filling them instead with an irrational hatred of all things not them, and thus deflect their peoples' righteous anger from their own failings and despotry.

In light of this, what's surprising, and dismaying, is not the imbalance of pundits in favor of Israel, but the fact that there are any on the other side.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:03 PM

It's The Culture, Stupid

I was watching Jerry Rivers kvetch about being accused of being of Jewish extraction by a terrorist from Hamas on Fox just now.

He was whining (in apparent surprise) that "this Hamas guy was a racist SOB!"

He was shocked...shocked!

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:39 PM

Asteroids Of The Gods

Paul Orwin has been bugging me for evidence that asteroid impacts have actually had an effect on humanity in the past (the post in which this occurred is actually the lead for my Fox News column today). I replied that it was certainly conceivable that the biblical flood and other mythical catastrophes could have been the result of such an event.

Someone via email pointed me to this article at Space.com from November that says exactly that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:57 PM

HTML Primer

As a public service announcement, and not to pick on the Insolvent Republic of Blogistan, but I just happened to notice it here as the latest inadvertent offender. Strict HTML requires that tags like <i> be opened and closed on each paragraph. If you don't, HTML-compliant browsers like Opera will display only the paragraph that has the tag in it as that font--the rest of the grafs will revert to standard text, even though the tag wasn't closed on the first graf.

This problem doesn't show up in Explorer, because it's either more forgiving, if you want to consider it a Microsoft feature, or non-HTML compliant, if you want to consider it a bug.

Anyway, as an Opera user, I often find it hard to tell excerpted text from the blogger's because the italics or whatever disappear after the first paragraph. Please fix this, if possible. I'll give Mr. Slotman a break, because I can understand the the tag supply may be limited in an insolvent republic...

Now back to your regularly-scheduled blogging, and be careful out there...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:45 PM

Blogspot Watch Back Up

After some discussion, I've decided to put it back up, for now, but I've reduced the checking frequency from twice a minute to once, and I'm only getting headers rather than the entire blogspot page. I'm going to close up the source again also, because it really could become a problem if lots of bloggers start doing the same thing.

I think that if this really shows up as significant traffic at Pyra, they'll figure out which IP to block. But as Steven Den Beste says, they have hundreds of thousands of sites, and get millions of hits per hour. I suspect that right now it's just spitting in a hurricane in terms of bandwidth.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:41 PM

Where No Fact Has Gone Before

Dave Kreiger has some amusing anecdotes about his adventures as a scientific fact checker for Star Trek:TNG

It confirms what I've said before about television and movie writers and producers being willfully, even joyfully ignorant about basic science and logic.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:37 AM

I have nothing to say about yesterday's atrocity in Israel but, as usual, Lileks does. The contrast technique of his prose is staggering.

Also, lots of good related discussion over at Charles Johnson's site.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:45 AM

Overwrought

Den Beste has a good piece debunking much of the press hysteria about "dirty bombs".

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:25 AM

Canada, Are You Sure You Don't Want Him Back?

Reader Randolph Addison writes:

Peter Jennings is in the Palestine/Israel region right now [on ABC radio] interviewing people and getting their feelings on the violence. Had I not heard this from his own mouth, I would have simply not believed the depths of moral relativity that exists in this man. To quote as closely as possible, he said, "...when I interview Israelis, it's almost exactly like interviewing the Palestinians...no, wait, not exactly but very close to. They are both mired in distrust for the other side and feel as though they are entrenched in violence and cannot think of [this is the best part] an imaginative solution..." And he said some more about their distrust and similar feelings, etc.

Yes, because Palestinians who celebrate the death of babies are exactly like Israelis who just want to exist and will retaliate against Palestinian soldiers and militia infantry. I figure if I interview a rapist and his victims, I will get exactly the same interview from both sides. The rapist will say, "Gosh darnit, them there people were asking for it by being all damned snippy and haughty towards me after I cleaned their windows, looking all fancy...they're just trying to rub their wealth in my face by hiring me."

And the victims will have roughly the same story of, "...I just don't see why I had to provoke him by acting as though I was better just because I go to work every day and make a good living. I should not have hired him to clean our windows because it just highlights in the financial disparity of our backwards capitalist system." Yep.

I never liked Peter Jennings for his haughty more-pious-than-thou attitude on everything (even when he is clearly wrong and should know it). This took me over the edge. To draw moral equality between them is just...well, amazing.

One more reason that fewer and fewer watch network news.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:17 AM

Blogspot Watch Problem

It's been brought to my attention that I (and anyone else who may be running my script) may be making the Blogspot problem worse with all the hits it gets from my status tests.

While there are some things that can be done to the script to mitigate some of the problems, I'm going to take it down for now, and am asking any others who may have done something similar to it to do the same. I'd also like to initiate a discussion about whether a) such a thing is a good thing to have (as several have told me) and b) if so, what the best way is to achieve it without exacerbating it.

[Update at 9:27AM PST]

Carey Gage comments:

Since you started your status check, I've been coming here, checking both your content and blogger's status before going to any blogspot sites. I think your idea was a good one, if only in terms of convenience.

But having ten blogs hitting on blogspot to check its status once every minute will undoubtedly aggravate his traffic problem and is also much more than is needed. One non-Blogspot site, checking once every five or ten minutes would be a convenience and would not add excessively to Blogspot's traffic.

Which one? You thought of it, you implemented it. I think you should do it to the exclusion of everyone else. If that gets you extra hits, well and good (if you want them). Can you handle the extra traffic generated by being a blogspot "gateway" without incurring the same traffic problems as he does?

Well, getting hits for the sake of hits was not necessarily the goal. I really did it for my own use, and for the use of my regular readers. I suspect that if people are coming just to see Blogspot status, they're not necessarily hanging around to read anything else. If that's the case, then it would make more sense to set up a separate page just for that (with a separate link to the blog), to minimize my own bandwidth.

Once every five minutes is twice as much as once every ten. It's a matter of how much data resolution we want to get. Just going from twice a minute to once would reduce the load by half.

Other thoughts?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:26 AM

March 27, 2002
History Question

Can anyone remember the last time an Arab nation (or for that matter, an Islamic nation) won a war unassisted?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:50 AM

The Ultimate Terrorist Target

Leonard David has an article in today's Space.com on the rapidly-approaching feasibility of a space elevator. Apparently, rapid advances in the manufacturing of buckey-tube-based materials of unprecedented tensile strength are making this a viable near-term technology, which in turn makes it possible to build a tower to the heavens.

The basic concept is that if you place a satellite in geostationary orbit (where most communications satellites reside) it will, by definition, remain at a single point over the earth's surface (at the equator). Drop a cable all the way down thousands of miles to that point, and tether it (just as suspension bridges often start as a single cable across a gorge). Now beef up the structure, and put the center of mass of the system beyond geostationary altitude, which puts it into tension.

Build elevators into the structure, and you have a means of getting into space for the costs of the energy alone (plus, of course the amortization and maintenance costs for the elevator). This is just a few dollars per pound, which is orders of magnitudes less than the current methods of using rockets.

That would make a space vacation possible for almost anyone who can now afford a trip to Hawaii. It would also make space a much more practical location for the storage of nuclear waste and the construction of solar power satellites that might eventually render nuclear plants unnecessary.

Unfortunately, as was brought home most dramatically last September 11, it would also make the most visible and monumental target possible for a terrorist.

The potential energy in such a structure would be unimaginable (though not incalculable). If it were somehow released from its equatorial mooring (in addition to the tremendous loss of capability and loss of life of whoever was on it), it might whipsaw around the local landscape like a python on meth, potentially causing tremendous damage on the ground before finally drifting out into space (where it would become a major navigational hazard for orbiting satellites, facilities, and even tourist hotels). It's possible (though unlikely) that it could even ultimately strike the Moon. It would make the events of last September look like a Sunday-school picnic.

This is, of course, not an argument against doing it. But it does add some additional requirements for its construction that might not have been considered prior to the WTC attack. For instance, the structure near the base should probably be capable of withstanding a small nuclear detonation, if possible. It should certainly be capable of withstanding a collision with any existing aircraft (including supersonic). Security in the area should be strict (at least as far as explosive devices go), with a large keep-out zone on the ground and in the air.

I might be using this as the basis for the Fox News column tomorrow, so I'd appreciate any other thoughts that people have on the subject.

[Update at 5PM]

OK, having given it a little more thought, it seems to me that the problem with the article was that it didn't mention any of the problems. It was gung ho about how the technology to do this is almost here, which means to me that we now have to give some serious thought to the real showstoppers.

I see two serious issues, either or both of which are likely to keep this from happening for a long time, and perhaps forever.

First, if a structure is towering from the equator to a third of the way to the Moon, no objects can safely orbit the earth at any altitude below that. No GPS, no remote sensing satellites, no space stations, nada. The only satellites that can safely orbit are the geostationary comsats. The reason for this is that all other orbits will eventually intersect the structure, resulting in a spectacular collision, unless they are managed carefully, and they can't be managed that carefully--such an accident is inevitable.

The second problem is the one that I mentioned above, and it's potentially much worse. If it breaks off in space, while the part above the break will go flying off into an elliptical orbit, or perhaps out into the solar system, the part below will come crashing down to earth. Much of it won't burn up, because it won't have much velocity.

So, as technically neat as skyhooks are, I have trouble seeing any political conditions under which such a risky project, requiring the total obsolescence of our existing orbital infrastructure, to fly. We are going to have to continue to work at creating new markets that can drive down cost of the launch rocket-based space transports, because I think we'll be stuck with them for a long time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:52 AM

March 26, 2002
Take That, Riyadh

Of all sources, the Guardian informs us that the US is moving its Gulf HQ from Saudi Arabia to Qatar.

My only question is, what took them so long?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:32 PM

Blogspot Watch is OPEN SOURCE!

Thanks to a suggestion by Jeff Goldstein, I've decided to make my blogspot watch script available.

All I ask is that you give me credit, and provide a link to my page if you decide to try to implement it. I make no guarantees...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:56 PM

Blogspot Watch Update

At the suggestion of Charles Johnson, I've done something even more nefarious.

You will no longer have to check the asterisks to see if you should bother to click on blogspotties. If Blogspot is down, the Blogspot links will simply...vanish. They will return when the server is back up.

This should make life easier for my faithful readers.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:10 PM

Good Alibi

A Munich man was investigated for murder after his neighbors reported seeing him carrying a corpse into his apartment.

When the police entered the place, he showed them (not clear whether it was with any degree of pride) his collection of inflatable bedtime companions.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:13 PM

Our Friend Saddam

I'd seen another story about this, and didn't get around to posting on it. Ken Layne was more diligent over at Fox News today.

Saddam has given a pay raise to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Other than that, there's no known connection between the Iraq regime and terrorism. Well, if you ignore the Prague meeting. And...

But I guess Chris Matthews thinks that it's OK to pay people to murder civilians, as long as they're just Israeli civilians.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:14 PM

Tinseltown Egos

Instantman points out an amusing post by Happy Fun Pundit (who I really have to permalink one of these days, albeit with an asterisk, as he's a blogspottie) about Hollywood egos and the Academy Awards, and the fact that they aren't all that popular in the "Red" states that voted for Bush.

I've never understood the cult of celebrity. It's always been fairly obvious to me that rising to the top of Hollywood is mostly a matter of luck. Looks and acting ability are certainly necessary, but there are many more people with those qualities than jobs in the industry or room on movie and television screens. If all of Hollywood came down with some kind of plague, replacements would appear within a year. Certainly brains are not a requirement, judging by some of the asinine things that some of these people do and say.

Anyway, I was amused at all of the egotistical concerns about security for the event, as though it would be bin Laden's highest-priority target. I suspect that if terrorists were actually stupid enough to attack this parade of (fortunate) pompous blowhards, at least half the country would cheer.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:02 AM

Rational And Irrational Fears

It's long been known that people aren't very good at aligning their fears and emotions, and resulting behavior, with statistics. For example, the chance of dying in a car is much greater than in an airplane, but many more fear to fly than to ride. Even people who are numerate are prone to this quirk of human nature (e.g., the great science fiction author and chemistry PhD Isaac Asimov had a severe fear of flying, and always traveled by train). On the other hand, people vastly overestimate their chances of winning the lottery, at least from a rational expected-value perspective.

I've occasionally talked about the dangers of asteroids in this weblog, and in fact featured it in my Fox News column last week. I've seen quite a bit of skepticism on the issue, some of which may be justified, but it often appears to me to be driven as much by the non-rational parts of us as the rational, even when coming from scientists.

When coming from politicians, of course, it's even worse. A couple of weeks ago, an Australian cabinet minister ridiculed people who were concerned about asteroids, and refused to allot the paltry sum of a million dollars in order to look for them in the Southern Hemisphere, one of our current major blind spots. There are many sky surveys being done above the equator, but very few below.

It actually reminds me of the controversy of a couple of decades ago, when Luis Alvarez at Berkely first put forward his theory of dinosaur extinction being caused by an extraterrestrial impact. While it's become fairly well accepted today, many aren't aware, or have forgotten, that there was a tremendous amount of resistance to it when it was first propounded. And that resistance seemed to go beyond rational scientific argument--it seemed almost religious in its fervor.

Viewing this as a college student, who was interested in and familiar with space, I found nothing exceptional about the theory at all, but it was clear to me that much of the scientific community had a deep emotional investment in not believing that our planet could be so dramatically affected by an event beyond our atmosphere.

I'm not sure why exactly, but one might speculate that, to a planetary scientist used to thinking in terms of geological and biological processes forming and reforming the earth and its inhabitants, invoking forces extraterrestrial perhaps had the feel to it of the supernatural--a blow literally from the heavens, and one from a source with which they were (not being astronomers or extraplanetary scientists) unfamiliar and unknowledgable. It may have almost seemed like a creationist theory of evolution.

More practically, to accept such a concept might imply that their chosen field was much broader than their traditional education, and that much of what they had been taught was wrong. It was probably a natural resistance to a major scientific paradigm shift.

Fortunately, unlike actual creationist theories, it was testable, and evidence for it has been found, and now, after a quarter of a century, it's now taught as the prevailing theory.

Anyway, there's an interesting article on this subject in Space.com today, that has some interesting statistics on the subject (though I can't vouch for them). Anyone whose interest has been piqued by my previous comments on the subject will find it at least as interesting as mine.

Basically, the thesis is that we base our fears not on analysis, but on what's familiar. Prior to September 11, few took the terrorist threat seriously--now concern about it is very high and it can command huge numbers of societal resources. Hopefully, it won't take an asteroid strike to get similar motivation to map and deter potential cosmic threats, but judging by human nature, it may.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:41 AM

March 25, 2002
Yasser Arafat, Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Krauthammer has a piece in (be still, my heart) the WaPo about the notion that the spate of suicide bombings in Israel over the past decade are not the fault of that nation, but (gasp!) Yasser Arafat.

It is precisely in the context of the most accommodating, most conciliatory, most dovish Israeli policy in history that the suicide bombings took hold.

Where, then, did they come from? During the past eight years--the years of the Oslo "peace process"--Yasser Arafat had complete control of all the organs of Palestinian education and propaganda. It takes an unspeakable hatred for people to send their children to commit Columbine-like murder-suicide. Arafat taught it. His television, his newspapers, his clerics have inculcated an anti-Semitism unmatched in virulence since Nazi Germany.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:33 PM

Common Sense From The Great White North

Up is down, in is out, and Canada has come out with a sensible recommendation set for hijacking procedures (despite the reporter's hysterical description).

The most dramatic proposal advises the government to adopt a public position of non-compliance with hijackers, a hardline stance that would force pilots to ignore terrorists' demands even if it puts passengers at risk.

Currently, air crews are trained to negotiate with hijackers and acquiesce to their demands when passenger safety is threatened. The new approach recommended by the working group would instruct pilots to land the plane as quickly as possible, regardless of what hijackers are doing to passengers.

The new policy was recommended because the suicide hijackings in September dramatically changed the dynamics of airline terrorism. Since then, pilots have been working without any new instructions on how to deal with hijackers, although many vow to never give up control of the flight deck after having seen commercial airliners used to bring down the World Trade Center.

But non-compliance creates the horrifying scenario of pilots, locked in the cockpit, refusing to cede control of their aircraft even as hijackers torture or kill passengers in the cabin. It is also thought that, in some situations, firm non-compliance could escalate confrontations with hijackers who are not suicidal.

This, of course, assumes that the passengers will just sit by as greatly-outnumbered hijackers kill or torture them. This seems like an unrealistic scenario, post 911. At least, on American (the nationality, not the airline) aircraft. I suspect that ordinary Canadian citizens also have more spunk than this comment would give them credit for.

Hey, is there any constitutional reason that we can't get a Canadian to replace Norm Mineta?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:58 PM

Blogspot Watch

OK, as a public service to Blogdom, I've set up my Blogspot traffic signal. It's a script that runs in background on my server, and attempts an http access of blogspot.com once a minute. If it's successful, it gives the green signal. If not, you'll get the red traffic signal. (Note: I only run it on the main index page, so if you came here via a link to the specific post, you won't see it).

Next, I'm going to put the Mark of Blogspot on the blogspotties, so you'll know which links to not bother with when it's down.

Let me know if it works. It seems to be doing OK, so far. Blogspot's been down for while, and it just came back up, and the script seemed to pick it up.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:32 PM

Nanonewt

Paul Hsieh over at Geek Press seems shocked to learn that Newt Gingrich is a nanotech fan.

He shouldn't be. Though you'd never know it from the libelous screeds put out by the liberal press after the Republicans won the Congress, from which you'd assume that he lived in a cave, and had the nightly chore (like me) of clawing grit out of his knuckles, Newt is actually a futurist and an idealist.

In the early eighties, he was on the board of the L-5 Society, a non-profit organization that promoted the colonization of space. He is familiar with, and has promoted the concept of solar power satellites. But when he became speaker, he probably decided that it would be wise to avoid such issues, and stick to those that were more politically crucial and realistic.

Anyway, people who only think of him as a neanderthal will be shocked to read this interview. He was one of the most technologically-savvy politicians to have ever held office.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:30 PM

Ideology, Oil, And Idiotarianism

The Chronicle continues to live up to its reputation as the worst newpaper in the world, as evidenced by this latest bit of stupidity from Chris Matthews. Poor Chris--he's adrift in a sea of confusion. Can someone please toss him a clue? Make it a really big one, with lots of handles, and the words "CLUE" emblazoned on every side in big, loud red letters, with a klaxon horn.

It will take 200,000 U.S. troops to invade Saddam Hussein's capital and effect the "regime change" demanded by neo-conservative policy wonks and backed by oil-patchers George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Cite? Logic? Analysis?

We don't need no stinkin' justification for these numbers we pull out of our nether regions--we're a big-time newspaper columnist.

The question America needs to answer now, while there's still time to stop this road trip, is whether a war justified by ideology and energy economics is truly in this country's interests.

Ummm...Chris? That would be known as a complex question. You know, like the one about whether or not you've quit beating your wife? Or when you're going to stop writing columns in which you've tarted up some ill-founded and ignorant opinions to masquerade as informed fact?

Here's a fact, Chris--the war is driven by national self defense, a concept with which former Kennedy liberals like yourself used to be familiar, but with which you have somehow become disengaged since the era of, oh, Vietnam or so.

A U.S.-Iraqi war has advanced well beyond the "contingency" phase. The last barrier of restraint, Secretary of State Colin Powell, has been broken by the will of a Bush administration partnership of ideology and oil that is now set on war.

Poor Colin.

He first put up brave resistance against the evil ideologists and oil men, but Cheney called up the goons. He was taken to a room deep in Dick's locationally-undisclosed cave, where he was liberally lubed with central Texas Sweet, and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. They alternated between rubber hose beatings, bright lights, Iraqi dripping-oil torture, and readings from Rice and Wolfowitz.

After weeks of this unending gruesome anguish, disoriented (unlike Chris), he could barely tell the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter like Yasser Arafat or Saddam Hussein.

Now, a shattered man, by day he attends the cabinet meetings, but only in a perfunctory manner, for appearances. At night, he lies curled up there on the Bottom called Foggy, his will broken, whimpering. He was the Only Man Who Could Save The World, and he has failed.

[most of hysterical screed against neo-conservatives snipped]

The neo-cons casually compare Iraq to the Third Reich, Israel to forsaken Czechoslovakia and skeptics to Neville Chamberlain, but their evidence for attacking Iraq doesn't hold up. The anthrax letters came from a source far nearer to our shores than Baghdad. And CIA chief George Tenet testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the "jury's still out" on whether Hussein had anything to do with Sept. 11.

Well, here you make the same error as your like-"minded" friends over on the other side of The Pond. There is an unstated, and false assumption implicit in this statement. You believe, and expect everyone else to agree, that only states that participated in the events of last summer can justifiably be attacked.

Of course, by your logic, we couldn't have gone in and done a regime change in Afghanistan prior to September 11, even if we had found evidence of exactly what bin Laden planned to do.

Here's the deal, Chris. See, we're defending ourselves. And often the best defense is a good offense.

Before September 11, when folks in funny hats said they wanted to kill us, we thought that was just so cute. We patted them on the head, said "nice little terrorist," and sent them off to play.

After September 11, we believe them. We're trying to prevent them from doing it again. Sometimes that means hitting them before they can hit you.

Oil is a much more powerful motive for an Iraq attack.

Says you.

Iraq is the Mideast's No. 2 supplier of oil, behind Saudi Arabia. The United States, swallowing a quarter of the world's production, is the world's No. 1 consumer. This country is led by a pair of oil-patch veterans who share a sense of entitlement about the world's oil reserves regardless of what flag flies above them. Bush and Cheney see Hussein's chief weapon of mass destruction as his threatened grip on the Persian Gulf oil tap.

What's your point? Do you understand the difference between correlation and causation? The fact that Iraq has oil, and we need oil to run our economy, does not lead to the ineluctable conclusion that we will make war on the Iraqi regime because we want the oil (though that may very well be a beneficial side effect).

After all, the Saudis are number one, Chris. We're not beating the war drum to do a regime change in Riyadh (though we probably should be).

Basically, what you're doing here is libeling Bush and Cheney--accusing them of being disingenuous liars.

This confluence of interest between ideology and oil has put us on the road to Baghdad. It's time for us to realize that American principles have precious little to do with this costly prospective military campaign.

"Ideology"? I suppose, if you think that being opposed to our own destruction by amoral, cold-blooded psychopaths is a blindly ideological position.

Here's a massive, glow-in-the-dark clue for you from Victor Davis Hanson, Chris:

After 30 years of listening to nauseating chanting from Teheran to Islamabad to Nablus, hearing the childish rants about "The Mother of All Battles" and "The Great Satan," and witnessing presidents from Carter to Bush burned in effigy, the ritual torching of the American flag, the misspelled banners of hatred, the thousands of paint-by-the-numbers posters of psychopaths from Khomeini to bin Laden, televised threats that sound as hideous as they are empty, Nazi- inspired anti-Semitism, embassy takeovers, oil-boycotts, hijacked planes, cars, and ships, lectures from unelected obese sheiks with long names and gold chains, peacekeepers incinerated in their sleep, murders at the Olympics, bodies dumped on the tarmac of airports, shredded diplomats, madmen in sunglasses in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, demented mullahs and whip-bearing imams in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, continual televised murders of Americans abroad, our towers toppled, our citizens butchered, our planes blown up, hooded Klansmen in Hamas and Hezbollah, killers of al-this and Islamic-that, suicide bombers, shrill turbaned nuts spouting hatred on C-SPAN broadcasts, one day the salvation of Kuwait, the next sanctions against the swallower of Kuwait, the third day fury against the sanctions against the swallower of Kuwait, the fourth day some grievance from 1953, the fifth another from A.D. 752; and all the time sanctimonious fingerpointing from Middle Eastern academics and journalists who are as bold abroad in insulting us as they are timid and obsequious under dictators at home in keeping silent, I've about had it. No mas. The problem is you, not us ? you, you, you...

The truth is that there is a great storm on the horizon, one that will pass ? or bring upon us a hard rain the likes of which we have not seen in 60 years. Either we shall say "no more," deal with Iraq, and prepare for a long and hard war against murderers and terrorists ? or we will have more and more of what happened on 9/11. History teaches us that certain nations, certain peoples, and certain religions at peculiar periods in their history take a momentary, but deadly leave of their senses ? Napoleon's France for most of a decade, the southern states in 1861, Japan in 1931, Germany in 1939, and Russia after World War II. And when they do, they cannot be bribed, apologized to, or sweet-talked ? only defeated.

If you want to write a newspaper column, learn from the master. That's why we're going into Iraq.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:02 AM

New Red Star In Orbit

The Chinese claim to have successfully launched their new manned capsule (without anyone in it, this time).

They do seem to be on track to developing their own independent crewed space capability, with the medium-term goal of sending Taikonauts (their word for astronauts) to the Moon. I hope that they do, because they'll likely succeed, which may spur us to get off our butts here, and the way they're going about it (using expendable rockets) will be easy to compete with if we ever harness free enterprise to the problem. Their program is basically a knock off of the Soviets.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:08 AM

The Stupidity Defense

Layne is being culturally insensitive today.

You've heard of the insanity defense? Apparently the Arabs are trying to use the stupidity defense.

Buy a plane ticket? Sure! Next thing you're going to tell me is that an Arab Muslim can drive a car or use an ATM or brush his teeth. Arab Muslims are retarded! We know that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:57 AM

Clinton Legacy Watch

Commenting on my post about a possible Iraqi connection to OKC, fellow blogger John Hudnall makes an additional point that's worth repeating.

After 911, Bill Clinton was whining to his toadies and sycophants about how cruel and unfair history was--he never had an opportunity to be a great president, because he didn't get to preside over a war. That sum'bitch Bush just had all the luck.

But as I pointed out, there was a lot of evidence of international connections to the OKC bombing, which was the biggest terrorist attack on US soil up until that time (since the first WTC attempt in 1993 was unsuccessful). But the Administration actively avoided following the evidence trail.

I already pointed out one reason--they wanted to demonize their political enemies, and not dilute any of the blame. But the other reason is perhaps that, had they actually found hard evidence of Iraqi involvement, they would have had to do something about it, and the public would have likely been unimpressed with lobbing a few cruise missiles at aspirin factories. Particularly considering Mr. Clinton's own history, and his cabinet picks, this was not an Administration with either the temperament or talent to fight a real war.

So Mr. Clinton potentially had his opportunity for a war against terrorism in Oklahoma City. He chose instead, as Mr. Hudnall says, to use it for crass domestic partisan advantage. Had he instead sought to find the full truth, and properly responded to it, what happened on September 11 might have been avoided.

And thus the legacy continues to build.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:13 AM

March 24, 2002
Blog Software Upgrade

I've upgraded from Movable Type 1.4 to 2.0. I hope that it will help with the problems that some people have been having in posting comments, but at least I'm using the most current version.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:21 PM

Iraqis In Oklahoma?

Most political observers agree that the Oklahoma City bombing resurrected Bill Clinton's political career, or at least initiated the process. The Democrats had just lost the Congress in the 1994 elections, due to the health-care debacle, gun control, and a number of other overreaches. There were stories in Time and Newsweek about the "incredible shrinking President" and whether or not he was "relevant."

OKC changed all that almost overnight. It not only allowed the Big He to go out on one of his "feel your pain" trips, but he and his minions used it to blast militias, talk radio, and evil Right-Wing Republicans, blaming them and their "hate speech" for the bombing.

All of this slander was contingent, of course, on the fact that the job was done, and done solely, by a member of such a "right-wing group." So Tim McVeigh was the perfect fall guy, from the Administration's point of view. Once they had the goods on him and Nichols, they basically quit looking for anyone else. Remember "John Doe #2"? Few others do, either, because all evidence that could implicate anyone but McVeigh and Nichols was excluded from their trial, and it became quickly forgotten.

While it could be argued that such evidence was irrelevant to the case against them, and thus properly excluded, it was also convenient to those who wanted to demonize the "right," since it allowed the finger of blame to be pointed only at the evil right wingers. That full justice was never served wasn't as important as making clear how evil McVeigh and like-thinking people were.

Well, now that we're digging into terrorism, and terrorist connections, in light of the past few months, some old skeletons may be starting to clatter out of the closet, as described in this article at Insight. In the process of seeking additional justifications to go after Saddam, yet another old Clinton coverup may finally see the light of day.

Note the last, and key, paragraph:

But one thing is clear: Bill Clinton and Janet Reno exulted when they found a domestic conspiracy behind the Oklahoma City bombing, say administration insiders, and immediately ordered the FBI to call off its investigation of any international connection. Details of that connection finally are beginning to emerge.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:02 PM

Blogspotty

Down again.

I'm whomping up a little perl script that will check once a minute or so automagically to see if it's working. It'll turn on a little traffic signal (green for up, red for down) so people can know not to waste any time with blogspotters.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:25 PM

Still In Denial

In an article in Salon last week, Josh Marshall displayed his tendency to check his brains at the door when it comes to the Clintons. The full article is only available as a "premium" (i.e., you have to pay cash money for it), but I didn't bother, because this (free, thankfully) excerpt leads me to conclude that it's worth less than nothing:

The final report into the Whitewater investigation released Wednesday by the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) confirmed what had been known for some time -- that after all the tens of millions of dollars and eight years of investigation, the OIC found no evidence of any criminal activity on the part of Bill or Hillary Clinton in the various dealings that fell under the catchall heading of "Whitewater."

As I already pointed out previously, if Josh really believes this, he's delusional, or he didn't read the report (I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and not simply call him a liar). And when a couple of Washington Post reporters tried the same thing the other day, their on-line headline later had to be revised to reflect reality.

Contrary to finding "no evidence of any criminal activity," Mr. Ray actually found quite a bit--he just didn't think that he had enough to get a conviction. But, as is the case with all Clinton liars and spinners, "insufficient" evidence somehow gets transmogrified into "none," and it's just a witchhunt on those poor paragons of virtue by the evil rightwingers.

Well, Josh, by your own standards, I find no evidence that you are a serious journalist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:39 AM

The Blasphemous West

Steven Den Beste has a nice description of Japan's martial history and how it was necessary to end it and entirely restructure their culture in order to get a lasting peace with them.

The point, of course, is that we will almost certainly have to do the same thing with Islam, at least Wahabi Islam, to end the current war. It's a long read, but a good one. As Steven says, our very existence is not just a threat to them--it's blasphemy.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:48 AM

March 23, 2002
Cracks In The Dam?

There's an interesting little item in the Village Voice about questions concerning Cliff Baxter's demise. He was the Enron executive who ostensibly committed suicide, but according to this report, he was talking about hiring a body guard shortly before his death--a behavior more consistent with later homicide than suicide.

But what I found most interesting were these words:

Those who doubt the official line think he's another Vince Foster, murdered in cold blood to stop him from spilling the beans on Enron chief Ken Lay and blowing open the whole scam?offshore accounts, political connections, and all.

The title of the piece contains Foster's name as well. He says it as though it's established fact that Foster was murdered. Gee, while the Village Voice is hardly mainstream media, I thought that it was only "right-wing nuts" who have suspicions about the circumstances of Mr. Foster's strange departure from this world.

Now that Mr. Starr has long departed from the prosecutorial scene, Mr. Ray has submitted his final report, and the Clinton's have been out of office and power for over a year, I wonder if we're going to start to see cracks appear in the official story on Foster?

If either Clinton, or even a Clinton or Rodham relative get indicted and/or convicted for the pardon mess, we may see the floodgates start to burst here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:21 PM

March 22, 2002
Pot, Meet Kettle...

At The Nation, the eternally loathesome Eric Alter writes:

Now Sullivan has launched a career in the brave new world of "blogging," or vanity websites. And while his site arouses a certain gruesome car-wreck fascination, it serves primarily as a reminder to writers of why we need editors.

Well, certainly Mr. Alterman is the poster child for that concern. Maybe Katrina, Victor and David Corn were all on vacation this week. Or maybe the editors need editors...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:56 PM

In Defense Of My Home Town

I'm getting a little tired of having my home town of Flint, Michigan being continually slandered and libeled by the Australian oppressor and others, including Michael Moore. He is not from Flint. That benighted town has lots of problems, some even of its own making, but spawning the likes of Michael Moore is not one of them.

According to one of his many contradictory stories, he himself claims that he was raised in rural Lapeer county, and according to one of his fan websites, he was actually born in Davison (now a suburb just east of the growing city, but at that time a small town outside of it). Of course, I didn't have to look it up on the Internet. Being there at the time, I knew that.

In 1954, Michael Moore was born in Davison, Michigan, a suburb of Flint, to an Irish Catholic family of laborers.

Well, now we know that being a laborer is not genetic.

At 14, Moore, impressed by the Berrigans, joined a diocesan seminary. But a year later, he was asked to leave.

What a shocker.

Moore cited girls as the main proponent.

And the girls no doubt cited him as the main repellent.

He was forced to return to Davison High School, where he became a star of the school debate team, a student-government organizer and even authored a school play.

Note: Davison High School. Not a Flint high school.

In 1970, Moore received the Eagle Scout award. His Eagle Scout project was a slide show exposing the worst polluters in Flint.

Was he part of the show? Based on first-hand reports of his personal hygiene habits, inquiring minds want to know.

And we have good reason to be suspicious. After all, he is famous for creating exposes of things for which he himself could be a poster child (e.g., "Stupid White Men").

Though, I suppose he'd be exempt in this particular case, being a resident of Davison.

After high school, Moore worked several jobs, including one at Buick, which he quit on his first day.

How does one "work" a job that one quits on the first day? This is a logical miracle achievable, apparently in some immaculate way, only by someone who is the offspring of "laborers."

In 1972, spurned [sic] on by Donald Priehs, his former government teacher, Moore decided to run for the school board and won; at 18, Moore became the youngest member to sit on the Flint City Council. Shortly after, Moore lobbied to get Priehs fired.

Isn't he a gem?

Moore caused so much trouble for the town that a recall drive was attempted. Moore dropped out of the University of Michigan, Flint because he was too busy suing his town in court.

And the University rejoiced.

Shortly thereafter, he headed out to infest San Francisco, and tormented my poor city no more until he came back in the late '80s to stalk Roger Smith.

And, as someone who was born within the city limits (the year after Mr. Moore) and a resident through my third year of college, I can assure all that Flint is nothing like Manhattan, a fact that I regretted throughout my childhood...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:12 PM

Red Faces At Gallup

Apparently, that public opinion survey done in the Islamic world was dramatically misreported.

These eye-opening results were "actually the average for the countries surveyed regardless of the size of their populations," the NCPP noted. "Kuwait, with less than 2 million Muslims, was treated the same as Indonesia, which has over 200 million Muslims."

That's Enron arithmetic. It's as if California and South Dakota each were granted the same number of electoral votes in presidential elections.

Also, apparently the Kuwait numbers weren't of Kuwaiti citizens:

One other problem: not everyone interviewed for the poll was Muslim. "The surveys were samples of all residents of the countries surveyed, not only Muslims," the NCPP statement read. (In hindsight, this probably was a minor problem: fewer than 500 of the 9,924 respondents were non-Muslim, according to Gallup.)

In fact, you didn't need to be a citizen of the country where the interviews were conducted. For example, fewer than half of the individuals in the Kuwait sample were Kuwaiti citizens.

So who were they? Saudis? Palestinians?

While the correct numbers still give a grim picture of Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. (much of which is fomented by a government-controlled press), it doesn't speak well for this much-vaunted polling organization.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:56 PM

Half A Century Of (Non) Wheel Spinning In Space

I've previously talked about how we're in a decade of fortieth space anniversaries. Well, today is a fiftieth anniversary of a very significant space-related cultural event.

Fifty years ago today, the first of a series of popular space articles was published in Collier's Magazine. This was a collaboration with several space engineers (including Werner von Braun and Willey Ley) and space artists, including the incomparable Chesley Bonestell.

It presented a future in space that helped prepare the American public for the upcoming space age. It included von Braun's vision of expansion into the solar system, nurtured even while he was designing the V-2 rockets for Hitler's Third Reich. The series described crewed reusable shuttles, large wheeled space stations (as later depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), lunar shuttles and bases, and manned flights to Mars. It later resulted in a Disney animated series that was shown on Sunday nights.

Unfortunately, for many reasons, the future didn't turn exactly as von Braun, Ley, Bonestell and others envisioned. NASA was formed in response to a public panicked by Sputnik, and then diverted from a slow, rational development of the high frontier to the Cold-War imperative of beating the Russians to the Moon (and per Lyndon Johnson's desires, helping industrialize the South) with the Apollo program. Once this pattern had been set in place, the space bureaucracy acquired an institutional inertia that has prevented us from making much further progress, at least in proportion to the funds expended on it.

There's another article on the topic from Space.com a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it's used as the background of a depressing puff piece for NASA and the International Space Station:

Some of the elements of the "Collier's Space Program," like the creation of crewed rockets, a reusable space shuttle and the first landings on the moon, have already been achieved. With a few trial runs behind us, we soon will be a step closer to a permanent crewed space station -- the next stage in the magazine's imaginary conquest of other planets -- once the International Space Station goes on line.

Yeah, right. No one on that team envisioned going to the Moon and then abandoning it. Or a reusable Shuttle that would fly only half a dozen times a year at a cost of over half a billion per flight. And there is nothing in the design (or location) of ISS that will allow it to make much of a contribution toward going to other planets.

At a planned size of 356 x 290 feet [118 x 97 meters], the ISS will favorably compare to von Braun's 250-foot [83-meter]- diameter ring-shaped station, which the Collier's team designed to hold 80 people.

Favorably compare?!

By what criteria? Apparently this guy thinks that size means something. Because it's a few tens of feet larger (because the solar panels stick out that far) than the planned wheeled station, he thinks that it's a better station, even though the wheel held 80 people, and ISS holds three (and perhaps a dozen if it ever gets fully built).

However, unlike the ISS, the Collier's station would have been built exclusively by U.S. funds. Given estimates that such a structure could be built by 1967, the total bill would have come in at around $4 billion in 1952 dollars.

And even accounting for inflation over the past fifty years, it would have been a bargain, compared to ISS, particularly when one considers that it had artificial gravity, and held an order of magnitude more people.

Australian David Sanders has produced a documentary of what life would have been like over the past half century had that vision been actually carried forward. From his website:

This film is based on an alternative timeline to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo era of reality - it is based on the premise that all that had been proposed in the early 1950's in Colliers actually came to pass - and sooner than they expected.

Through the expert use of special visual effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the world of wonder and imagination expressed though Collier's has become real. The film Man Conquers Space looks like a documentary from the 1960's, complete with varying grades of film quality, scratches and lab marks, and a tinny soundtrack - just the way it would appear today if it had indeed been made over 30 years ago on the limited budget afforded to documentary makers of that era.

David has the vision, even if Washington has lost it. Check it out.

[Update at 1:30PM PST]

Dr. Al Jackson has a web page commemorating this series, with his own personal recollections.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:53 AM

'N Orbit

The Lance Bass visit to space is apparently back on, with sponsorship from Radio Shack. Both Lunacorp and Mircorp apparently negotiated the deal (Lunacorp, a company that plans to place rovers on the Moon that can be teleoperated from earth, for a fee, had previously attained Radio Shack sponsorship for its concept).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:45 AM

March 21, 2002
Moore Is Less

Everyone else has been linking to Lileks' latest handiwork, so I wasn't going to bother, but it occurred to me that it would be funny if every time someone googled "Michael Moore," they would get Lileks' screed instead.

So...
Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Michael Moore

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:27 PM

More On Evil Republicans

My, I seem to have lit a small conflagration.

Will Wilkinson says (among other things):

For all I know, Rand may have the political calculus right: the net loss to liberty is smaller under Republicans. But this really just misses the point.

Well, no. I think that it's Will who's missing the point. My point was not that this kind of stuff doesn't dissuade freedom-seeking voters--it clearly does. My only point was that, given the available options, it shouldn't. He (and Glenn) are discussing "is." I'm discussing "ought."

If it's the case that the Republicans are on the whole better for liberty, then Rand should be very concerned that Republicans aren't associated in the popular imagination with obnoxious, unappealing, totalitarian lifestyle philosophies.

I never said that I wasn't concerned about it, and I'm certainly not defending Ashcroft--I think that he's an ass. I am concerned about it, but it does no good for me to simply be concerned about it.

I wish that all Republicans, or all Democrats, or all of both parties, would overnight become libertarian. But wishes aren't horses, so I'll have to keep on walking. All that I can try to do is assuage other's (IMHO, mistaken) concerns about the bedroom police if Republicans take over the government.

Most people aren't as bright as Rand, and they aren't very interested in determining what political program is really in their best interests. What people are interested in is a sense of identity. If a party grates against our sense of the kind of person we'd like to be, then we don't want anything to do with it.

Which is why we have a responsibility to continue to propogate anti-idiotarianism (to the best of our limited abilities), so that either the Republican Party will grate less, or people will vote in a more rational manner.

For me, effective socialists grate far more than bumbling moralists. Again, Will purports to speak for all these nameless others, but I sense that he's really speaking for himself as well (since he used the pronoun "our"). He'd apparently really rather vote for (or at least "identify with") people who will rob him blind, as long as they'll get down and party with him (though I understand from other posts on his site that he doesn't vote at all).

It's not just the Taxman, Will. It's the guy who doesn't let you drain a mud puddle because it's a wetland. It's a public-school principal who will let your kid die of asthma rather than let her keep her inhaler. It's the corrupt politician who will consign inner-city kids to an illiterate hell in order to satisfy the teacher's unions.

For all of his idiocy, has Ashcroft been worse for civil rights than Janet Reno? Ask the barbecued kids in Waco. Ask Elian.

What I'm saying is that this is at least partly, if not mostly, a perception problem (and Will and Glenn seem to agree in their commentary). Well, then part of the solution is to change the perception. That was the point of my post.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:38 AM

New Foxnews Column

My new Foxnews column is up. Nothing new here for regular readers, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:10 AM

March 20, 2002
CNN Outfoxes Themselves

There's an entertaining article at the New York Daily News about how Fox refugee Paula Zahn is not earning her keep at CNN. Apparently, her show is an expensive ratings disaster. I particularly liked the caption on the picture:

Paula Zahn: Provocative, supersmart and, oh yeah, just a little bit overpaid.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:14 PM

Fear Of Republicans

Instantman, in reference to an article about women and the sexual revolution, says:

This kind of stuff, by the way, is the reason why a lot of Democrats who are basically in agreement with the Republican party are still afraid to vote for Republicans.

This seems to be a common attitude among many libertarians (and to the degree that labels apply, I think that one fits Glenn about as well as any), particularly the ones who approached that philosophy from the left (i.e., former Democrats). I once had an extended email discussion (back during the election) with another libertarian friend (who's also a blogger, but shall remain nameless) about how as much as he disliked the socialism of the Democrats, he felt more culturally comfortable with them. Again, this is a prevalent attitude of products of the sixties. You know, Republicans were uptight fascists, and Democrats were idealistic, free-living, and hip.

While I'm not a conservative, my own sexual and drug-taking values (and life style) tend to be. I just don't think that the government should be involved in either of these areas. But my voting pattern is that I'll occasionally vote Republican (I voted for Dole over Clinton, the only time I've ever voted for a Republican for President), but I never vote for a Democrat for any office. The last time I did so was in 1976, and I'd like that one back.

There are at least two reasons for this.

First, I've found many Republicans who are sympathetic to libertarian arguments, and in fact are often libertarians at heart, but see the Republican Party as the most practical means of achieving the goals. There may be some Democrats out there like that, but I've never run into them. That's the least important reason (partly because I may be mistaken, and have simply suffered from a limited sample space). But fundamentally, the Democratic Party, at least in its current form, seems to me to be utterly antithetical to free markets.

But the most important reason is this--while I find the anti-freedom strains of both parties equally dismaying, the Democrats are a lot better at implementing their government intrusions, and there's good reason to think that this will be the case even if the Republicans get full control of the government.

This is because many of the Democratic Party positions are superficially appealing, if you're ignorant of economics and have never been taught critical thinking.

Who can be against a "living wage"? What's so bad about making sure that everyone, of every skin hue, gets a fair chance at a job? Why shouldn't rich people pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes?--they can afford it. Are you opposed to clean air and water? What's wrong with you? How can you be against social security--do you want old folks to live on Kibbles and Bits?

To fight these kinds of encroachments on liberty requires a lot of effort and argument and, in the end, it often loses anyway. Consider for example, the latest assault on the First Amendment that passed the Senate today, sixty to forty. Many Republicans voted against it. I don't think any Democrats did.

[Thursday morning update: Best of the Web notes that two Democrats did vote against it--John Breaux and Ben Nelson. Good for them. They also have a hall of shame for the Republicans who voted for it.]

On the other hand, the things that libertarians like Glenn and Nameless fear that conservatives will do (e.g., in matters sexual), are so repugnant to most Americans that they'll never get made into law, and if they do, the legislators who do so will quickly get turned out of office. So, you have to ask yourself, even if you dislike the attitude of people who are uncomfortable with the sexual revolution, just what is it, realistically, that you think they'd actually do about it if you voted for them?

The bottom line for me is that Democrats have been slow-boiling the frog for decades now, and they're very good at it. I tend to favor Republicans, not because I necessarily agree with their views on morality, but because I see them as the only force that can turn down the heat on the kettle, and that they're very unlikely to get some of the more extreme policies that they may want, because the public, by and large, views them as extreme.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:01 PM

Trampling On The First Amendment

Sixty Senators blithely ignored their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution, and passed McCain's execrable Campaign Finance Deform bill.

I hope that the President remembers his oath, but I'm not optimistic.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:39 PM

Nope, No Bias Here

Neely Tucker and Sue Schmidt inform us via headline that "Ray Concludes There Was No Wrongdoing on Part of Clintons."

This is not just misleading--it's a lie. Ray concluded no such thing. His report did not absolve the First Felons--it simply said that there was insufficient evidence to convict.

This is no doubt true because:
a) much of it was shredded, or witnesses were intimidated or paid off, and
b) it would have been difficult to find a jury that wouldn't have one or two die-hard supporters, resulting in a hung panel (as happened with Susan McDougal).

There was never any way to get the goods on that gang without an all-out RICO prosecution, and Janet Reno's Department of Injustice was never going to allow that.

And before I get a lot of nonsense about innocence until proven guilty, that applies only to courts of law, not courts of public (or private) opinion.

[Update at 2PM PST]

Compare and contrast the Washington Post headline with this (accurate) one from Fox:

Final Report Shows Clintons Benefited from Criminal Transactions

Whether this is a good summary of the report is, of course, disputable, but unlike the WaPo headline, at least it's true.

[Update at 3:20PM PST]

Down the ol' memory hole...

Now the subhead on the Tucker/Schmidt article has been changed from the above to Ray Criticizes Comments by Former President Clinton. You'll just have to take my word for it as to what the subhead was originally.

I wonder if they got a lot of angry email and calls, or if some editor just noticed it on his own. Thanks to The Sanity Inspector for pointing out the instant rewriting of history.

This kind of stuff really makes me angry, because it was ongoing throughout the entire eight years of the Administration. Clinton spinners and defenders would continually equate "insufficient evidence to convict" with "proof of innocence." So the public, who didn't necessarily actually read the underlying reports (whether Pillsbury, Starr, or whatever) would come away with the vague impression that the Clintons never did anything wrong, but were simply always under attack by the evil VRWC.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:51 AM

New Fox On The Block

Foxnews is apparently rotating guest bloggers on Wednesdays. Ye Olde Blogger Andrea Harris is up to bat today, and she competently expands on my own deepening disgust with Harry Browne.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:20 AM

March 19, 2002
We Don't Need No Stinkin' Army

I found an interesting post about the Afghan situation over at Brink Lindsey's web site today, which I mostly agreed with, but I found one sentence somewhat discomforting.

Specifically, we have to use our power to keep warlordism in check while the fledgling national government gets established, builds an army, and otherwise develops the capacity to project authority nationwide.

As someone (Harry Browne aside) who considers himself a libertarian, this grated. The purpose of an "army" is not to be used against a nation's own people. If there are warlords in Afghanistan to be quelled, and said entity is a nation, keeping down "warlords" is a job for the police, not an army. Armies (where they are justifiably used at all) are to be used against outside agressors--not against internal subversives.

I have no objection to Acting-President Karzai building up a force to pacify the Afghan nation, but to call it an "army" is to confuse terms, and potentially lay the foundation for a future police state.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:17 PM

Some Like It Hot

Scientists have come up with material that has the properties of a thermal diode (that is, it allows heat to pass in one direction, but not the other). At first glance, this seems to violate at least one of the laws of thermodynamics, but I'll have to read more and think about it more to have a firm opinion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:54 PM

Who Should Manage The Orbital Billiards Game?

We had another (cosmologically speaking) close call the other day; a piece of cosmic debris passed within half a million kilometers of the planet, a little farther than the distance to the Moon. It was previously uncatalogued, and approached us from the direction of the sun--our blind side.

If it had hit, it would have been at least as devastating as the Tonguska explosion in Siberia early last century, in which trees were leveled for miles around. Such a strike in a populated area could kill thousands, or millions.

Current estimates of the probability of such an event are one in ten million. I've previously discussed the desirability of at least doing a good sky survey to get a handle on the problem, but I'd like to talk again about a little different aspect of it.

Suppose that, after multiplying the probability times the potential damage, and getting some kind of expected value of avoidance, we do decide that this is a problem to which we should devote societal resources. Who should take care of the problem?

Many would reflexively say NASA, just because (unfortunately) NASA remains synonymous with space in many people's minds (though I'm working daily and weekly to change that perception). But NASA is an agency set up for research, development, and science--not deflecting wayward space rocks.

Well, it's a threat, so maybe we should put the Pentagon in charge. This actually makes sense, until you think about the problem a little more. If we were being attacked by ET, or Marvin the Martian or his Martian buddies, then sure, let's send the Space Patrol up there to kick some scrawny Martian butt.

But this is a natural phenomenon, not a smite from heaven at the behest of some malign intelligence (at least as far as we know). It's more like a forest fire, or a tsunami, or an earthquake, or a...flood.

A flood--yeah, that's the ticket.

It's basically just a problem of managing the whims of nature, and to the limited degree that we are capable of doing that, we have an agency in charge of such things. They build dams, and levees, and suchlike, and take preventive measures against future disastrous natural events. They're called the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE).

In addition to the fact that it seems like a natural (so to speak) role for them, the other thing that I like about the idea of using the ACE is that they could take fresh approaches--they wouldn't be bound by the institutional inertia of NASA and the Air Force Space Command in how they'd tackle the problem.

They'd have to take new approaches, because it would require different capabilities than any other space activity to date--moving minor planets. And the technology that allows us to divert asteroids to prevent them from pulverizing the neighborhood is the same technology that will allow us to utilize many of the abundant resources available in the solar system.

Finally, it would set up some competition in government space activities, which is sorely needed, and best of all, it might give them something else to do so they won't have time to build any more of those dam...err...darn dams.

[Update at 7 PM PST]

Jay Manifold has a nice report direct from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference with the latest thoughts of planetary researchers on the subject.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:12 PM

Simon Did It Right

William Saracino has the best mainstream analysis yet of why Simon beat Riordan. It matches up quite closely, of course, with my own analysis.

The Riordan operation resembled a bus carrying no one who knew how to get where it was supposed to go. The campaign hierarchy, filled with partisan Democrats, had no idea how to appeal to Republican primary voters. It is drilled into Democrats from their youths that Republicans, especially those terrible ?right-wingers,? have neither hearts nor minds ? that they are idiots devoid of ?compassion.? So it should be no surprise that those driving the Riordan bus lacked directions for reaching GOP voters? hearts and minds or that, in the end, they came nowhere close to their destination, winning a Republican primary.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:50 AM

It Depends On What He Would Have Meant By Wouldn't

In the epic liars contest between Bob Reich and Bill Clinton, Robert Musil comes down on Reich's side, after laboriously and amusingly parsing the Big He's words. Just proving, once again, that when it comes to the ex-President, Josh Marshall is all too credulous.

Note to Josh. Bill Clinton never says anything "pretty clearly."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:58 AM

March 18, 2002
And They Didn't Even Get To Chappaquidick

In the checkout counter tonight, one of the tabloids had the headline, "Twenty Five Years Of Covered-Up Kennedy Scandals Revealed! Murder, Sex, And Drug Abuse!"

I, for one, am just shocked.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:12 PM

Now They've Gone Too Far

According to Iowahawk, the academic fraud epidemic is approaching critical mass.

Consider:

...the ongoing feud between Harvard President Lawrence O'Neill and star African-American Studies professor Cornell West. Last year West threatened to lead an exodus of Harvard's black faculty to Princeton after O'Neill obliquely criticized West's recording of a hip hop album.

According to sources, O'Neill accused West of being a "punkass newjack sucka MC," having "whack flow" and "not representin.'"

West angrily defended his rapping skills, retorting that "Tha C-dog be rollin' hard and gots his shizit on point" and that he was a "Ninja on the mic." He accused O'Neill of jealousy and sexual impotence, noting that "old punk fool can't get no fly hos like the C-dog."

The bitterness over the incident has subsided, but tempers flared briefly when West, O'Neill and their posses crossed paths in Harvard Square after a faculty hydraulic car-bouncing competition.

and

"Unlike that old adage about doers-versus-teachers, I have marketable skills outside academics," says Agee.

"If worst comes to worst," he explains, "there's always journalism."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:23 PM

More Whistling In The Dark For Gray

Over at Instapundit (you know where it is...over there on the left), Glenn publishes an input from Orrin Judd:

Looking around the web recently, it seems to me that folks (especially in blogdom) are reading California in much the way they read New York in 2000, that is to say, inaccurately. You can string out reasons that a Hillary or a Gray Davis will lose until you are blue in the face, but at the end of the day, they are Democrats in Democratic states and they win. The race it most reminds me of is actually Mitt Romney vs. Ted Kennedy--attractive young GOP businessman vs. obviously outmoded liberal hack. The race looks close in Spring and early Summer but then the Dems come home to the party, hold their noses, and vote for the yellow dog.

There is one difference between those races and this year's race between Simon and Davis (well, actually there are several, but this is the biggest one). They fall on two different sides of an epochal divide called September 11. I think that people underestimate the change in mood that occurred last fall. I don't think that Lazio or Romney were ever ahead by eight points in the polls (as Simon seems to be right now, though it's not getting much ink or pixels). And I don't think that the Republicans were ahead of the Dems by as much in the Congressional preference polls as they seem to be now.

I think that it's overly simplistic to call California a "Democratic state." Even if registered Dems outnumber Republicans, they don't always outvote them (particularly when many of them are "motor voter" types, who wouldn't have bothered to register otherwise, and likely won't find their way to the polls).

Much of California Republican's problems arise from lack of enthusiasm among their own rank and file for non-entities like Fong and Lundgren. Give them someone to vote for, and they'll get a much higher turnout than the Dems can have any hope of expecting for Davis (which is why I believe, though we'll never know now, that win or lose, Simon will do better than Riordan would have).

So I think that Republicans have been losing because they've been putting up dud candidates. Maybe Simon will be, too, but I don't think so. Actually Orrin's argument is the last one that the Democrats have (not to imply that he's a Democrat, or not--I don't know his affiliation). With their candidate, they've got a loser on personality, his policies are universally recognized to be a disaster, he'll be campaigning against a candidate who'll have stratospherically-popular George Bush and Rudy Giuliani in his corner (probably with regular state visits), and his vaunted money-raising advantage will turn out to be a wash against a wealthy candidate not constrained by donation limits.

Match all that up with the new post-911 mood, and the argument that "the Democrats will come home in November" sounds an awful lot like the argument that "Gore will win in 2000, because the economy's good." A lot of political-science/economy professors got a major omelette on their collective faces from that one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:06 PM

Missing The Point

Over at NRO's non-blog, The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez is appalled that she saw a four-year-old boy searched in Seattle at the boarding gate.

As I was boarding a flight from Seattle to San Francisco, it was clear that the gate agent was merely counting, and sending every n-th person to be searched more thoroughly than the rest of us. The entire line was shocked and appalled when A 4 YEAR OLD BOY was selected as a target of their mindless procedure. He was scared, and his Dad was quite put out (understandably) as the security guy asked him to spread his arms and finagled his metal-detecting wand into his nooks and crannies. (Well, his nooks, anyway.)

We were all aghast, but it seems fruitless to complain about anything in this environment. If we don't expect airline or security workers to THINK, is it too much to ask that the Sec. of Transportation think? I don't think so. Isn't profiling better than THIS?

I think that she, and others who think that children shouldn't be targeted for searches are missing the real point. I'm opposed to such searches also--not because the targets are children, but because, post-911, for everyone, they are annoying and useless.

Once you accept the logic (as Ms. Lopez seems to) that we really do need to worry about box cutters, nail clippers, and Congressional Medals Of Honor on aircraft, then it actually makes more sense to search a child than, say, a little old lady. After all, how do they know that the child isn't carrying something that the father slipped on to his person to avoid getting searched himself? Once on the plane, he could simply retrieve it from the kid, and do whatever nefarious acts he could do with a sharp object.

Which is to say, nothing, because he's be torn limb from limb by crew and passengers, who are the real defense against air terrorism now.

That last is the argument that we need to make, and continue making, instead of whining about who's being searched and who's not.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:37 PM

Mr. Mom

The group Students for Individual Liberty is sponsoring a gun control debate at LA Harbor College, in Wilmington, CA. It will be between the Liberty Belles, a pro-2nd-amendment women's group, and the Million Mom March. The "million moms" are sending a man to debate their side.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:47 AM

March 17, 2002
Busy Signal

Sorry about the post paucity, but I've had a busy weekend, pulling CAT5 cable for a new LAN connection to the spare bedroom (Patricia needs it now that she's spending more time at home), seeing the latest Cirque du Soleil down in Long Beach (hint--it's mostly Chinese, and not as good as some earlier shows, but OK), picking up a niece at LAX (returning to USC from spring break) and nursing Patricia, because she's come down with some throat rot.

Tomorrow I have to finish up a proposal, but there may be some new stuff up in the afternoon (PST).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:44 PM

Bellicose Tinseltown Woman

Milla Jovovich loves guns. It'll be interesting to see how Hollywood reacts to this.

I guess those Eastern European Slavs know which way the wind blows when it comes to gun control.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:45 PM

Collegiality

George Will's commentary on This Week was Yet Another Rail against farm subsidies. I'm glad that he's willing to keep tilting at that windmill, but I found it amusing that he was too polite to mention Sam Donaldson's ongoing mohair payments.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:02 AM

Primary Bureaucratic Colors

Mark Steyn is once again a lonely but articulate voice in a call for common sense in airline security (and our utterly unjustified trust in big government since September 11). Where is everyone else in the punditocracy?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:20 AM

March 16, 2002
As The "Ain't No Bad Dude" World Turns

Brian has been missing in action for several days. Stephanie is first worried, then angry, as he pays no attention to her, and instead hobnobs in Europe with his friends at their "la de da" web sites and blows kisses at Ms. Berlitz.

Will Brian's jeep start? Will his hamsters be found lying in the shredded newspaper, their rodentary ribs showing, upon his return? Will they instead turn on each other, like a dinner party with Alferd Packer and Jeffrey Dahmer at the Donner's?

Will Stephanie ever forgive? Will she instead attempt to seduce the noble and ever-faithful Instantman in his Kentucky trailer?

More to the point, has Brian decided to kill off the Stephanie Dupont character?

Find out next week, on "As The 'Ain't' No Bad Dude' World Turns..."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:14 AM

March 15, 2002
Missile Sunset

Patricia was home for the weekend from Reno, and we went for a walk on the strand in Manhattan Beach to watch the sun sink beneath the Pacific. As we passed the pier, heading north, I saw a vertical arrow of white smoke, its head a ball of fire rising upward from the mountains above Malibu.

I pointed it out to her. "There's a launch out of Vandenberg."

We watched as it continued to move upward, and then curved over, compelled by gravity, as it headed south. The stage flickered out, and a second one ignited.

A couple minutes later, and it disappeared, its propellant expended, its fire extinguished, and its body invisible from the distance of hundreds of miles.

I told her it was probably a Minuteman, perhaps to launch a target thousands of miles southwest, to the lonely atoll of Kwajalein in the South Pacific. In the war, it suffered what was probably the most dense and intensive bombardment in history--thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of pounds of explosives, on a tiny lump of coral, to ferret out or destroy Japanese soldiers dug into it like ants in a hill. Now, it is the launch base to test the weapons that may allow us to knock down smites from our new enemies.

The smoke trail was twirled on the fingers of the jet stream. It was dark on the ground, but the rocket exhaust was dancing in the dying sunlight, lighting the night sky in a sun-drenched kaleidescope of swirling vapor and chemical fumes. It was a beauty both natural and artificial, and we were glad that we decided to take a walk on the beach that night.

When I got home, and heard that the most recent missile test was successful, I was most pleased to hear that my surmise was correct.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:31 PM

New Look At LATWTC

Megan McArdle has a new logo that's definitely worth a look. Worthy of one of Lileks' collections.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 PM

Lack Of LA Blogbash Pics

Jeff Jarvis laments the fact that there are no pictures of the party at Gene Volokh's house the other night. Me, too.

I took Patricia's Olympus 3030, but somehow both of the SmartMedia (TM) disks with me had become unformatted, and I didn't have a manual with me to figure out how to sort it out in real time. C'est la vie.

Better luck next time. Are there any from the Northern California party?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:38 PM

Nothing Could Be Further From Making Sense

"Nothing could be further from the truth."

In addition to becoming a hackneyed cliche (a phrase which itself is a "hackneyed cliche"), this sentence doesn't parse, at least to me. What does it mean?

Does it mean that it's possible for nothing to be further from the truth than for something to be? It reminds me of the old proof that a ham sandwich is better than eternal bliss.

Premise 1: Nothing is better than eternal bliss.
Premise 2: A ham sandwich is better than nothing.
Therefore: A ham sandwich is better than eternal bliss. QED

I hereby declare unconditional war on this cliche.

"Make no mistake about it..."

That last one actually does makes sense, but I also want to stomp it out anyway because it's so overused, especially in Washington.

I'm figuring that if we can fully eradicate both phrases, most politicians will be struck dumb(er).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:53 AM

March 14, 2002
More (Good) Bad Publicity

I've tried to keep this a Rall-free zone, but Jane Skinner on Fox News just had on the publisher of the magazine who ran the latest outrage about the greedy firefighters (I think it was Bob Guccione? but I'm not sure), and he was of course defending the stupid thing.

His story:

a) Good satire sometimes offends;
b) He found it very funny;
c) He had no intent to offend anyone by running it;
d) We must draw a distinction between depicting greedy firefighters in the present, and those same firefighters projected ten years into the future, and anyone who can't do that is hypersensitive.

I agree with (a).

I believe (b) (or at least I have no reason not to believe it--there's no accounting for taste or sense of humor). To me, it was utterly humorless, and anyone who found it funny is warped, but then there's no reason, based on that interview, to think that he's not.

I don't believe (c)--I think he's lying.

But the real crux of the issue is (d). In addition to being utterly unfunny, it was utterly pointless.

Good satire has a germ of truth. If his point was that the money flowing into charities is being misspent, there are many appropriate targets at which to aim satirical barbs (like the Red Cross, or United Way). But I'm not aware of any misappropriation or inappropriate expenditures of funds by the NYFD, past, present or (especially) future.

If in ten years, there are some activities by the NYFD that even vaguely resemble what are described in the cartoon, then it might be funny then (or at least as funny as it's possible for a Rall cartoon to be, which is, if history is any guide, not at all).

But to run it now is not only pointless, it is obviously meant to be simply iconoclastic and cruel, under the thin guise of satire.

But then, consider the source.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:46 PM

Harry, Harry, Quite Contrary

Just in case there was any doubt, Harry Browne has completely lost it. As a libertarian, this saddens me.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:32 AM

The American "Red" Cross

Dennis Prager is on fire about the Red Cross banning songs with the words "God" or "prayer" from their event in Orange County. His take is that they didn't really apologize--they just regretted that anyone found their decision offensive. It's not quite that bad. If you read their press release, they do admit that they made a "mistake in judgment," but the general tone is as Dennis said. They stand by whatever "principles" resulted in that judgment.

This is political correctness run utterly amok, and it seems to have appropriately ignited a firestorm when carried out by an organization called the American Red Cross.

As Dennis says, by their warped criteria, they can't say "American" and they can't say "Cross" because these terms are deemed potentially offensive.

That only leaves "Red."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:26 AM

Peaceful Religion Watch

Fifteen girls burned to death in a school in Saudi Arabia. They weren't allowed to leave the building, because they weren't properly attired.

[Thanks to Charles Johnson for the link.]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:00 AM

Porous Snake

I thought that the purpose of Anaconda was to cordon off the area so as not to allow any of the "rebels" (and what's up with that word, anyway? They're not "rebels"--they're colonial oppressors and terrorists) escape.

So why are we hearing news reports about some of them escaping?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:27 AM

Disappointment

Well, the Administration is 0 for 2 in policy in the last few days, once on the domestic front, and once on the war front.

First was last week's totally unprincipled decision to protect the steel industry. And now the president is undermining Israel's fight for survival (and our justification for our own actions abroad) by making a wretched moral equivalence between terror and defense against it.

Is he morphing into his father?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:00 AM

March 13, 2002
Another Blogger Hits The Big Time

Congratulations to Megan McArdle, who's had a cogent piece on the Microsoft case published in Salon. Better cash whatever checks you get quickly, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:39 PM

What Do You Want To Do?

The Orlando Sentinel has commissioned a public opinion poll about the public's attitudes toward NASA. At first reading, it's not good news for the agency, or for those who want NASA to send people to Mars. However, I think that it's potentially great news for our nation's future in space--I'll explain why in a minute.

There are some nice graphics with the piece as well.

In the first one, people expressed their view of what NASA's purpose should be. Research and development was by far the most popular (though it's hard to know if people really understand what this means). The bad news for Marsaholics is that only 9% support a mission to the Red Planet. There's more support (at 11%) for a total disbanding of the agency.

The second one shows that of all federal programs that might need cutting for war or budget purposes, more people (37%) think that NASA should be on the chopping block than any other federal area. Tax cuts come in number two, at 26%.

And just to put things in budgetary perspective, there's a graph of spending on NASA as percentage of the federal budget for the past four decades. There was a big spike during the Apollo program of about 4% of the budget (also, recall that the budget was much smaller then, relative to the economy), after which it's settled down to a steady one percent or so, year after year.

This last is significant because, among the many other things that most people don't understand about NASA, they're unaware of how little of the federal budget it actually is. You could completely zero it, and it would only provide enough funds to provide Health and Human Services with funding for a few days. This showed up in similar polls that we used to do when I worked at Rockwell International, in which large numbers of people would guess that NASA took up to half of the federal budget.

However, as little as it is, it is not to say that the money is well spent. And the real problem with this poll (like most polls) is the "false-choice" aspect of it. For instance, they didn't ask about the Moon. They didn't ask about public space travel. But one might infer from the overwhelming support for "research and development" that the public might hope that the program would provide something useful, and that they recognize that pure science and exploration cannot justify the budget.

If NASA can present a compelling vision as to how the space program will actually impact individual lives, I see a potential opening here for a renaissance of space. What these polls need to do is to stop asking, vicariously, what NASA should do, and instead ask the people themselves, "What do you want to do in space?"

When they have the answer to that question, they may have the basis for some kind of policy direction.

Oh, and as a side note, well...two side notes:

John Pike, space-policy expert and director of the defense think tank Globalsecurity.org, was more blunt.

"Rich white men like the space program; other people don't," he said. "Rich people are prepared to spend money on luxuries that poorer people aren't."

Well, at least he didn't say "stupid white men..."

Side note number one--labeling (or in this case, lack of labeling) press bias. One would have no idea from this neutral description that John comes from the left end of the political spectrum, and that his "defense think tank" is actually devoted to ensuring that we never develop significant weapons capability in space, either for space control, or even to defend ourselves against ballistic missiles.

Side note number two--John is a "space-policy expert" only in his own mind, and in the minds of the journalists (particularly liberal journalists---NPR just loves him, or at least they used to) who always reflexively go to him, mainly because he's good at sound bites.

Unfortunately, the press is lazy and unwilling to cultivate a broader stable of experts--once they find someone who both gives good soundbites and tells them what they want/expect to hear, they tend to return to the same (sometimes foul) well, instead of getting some fresh viewpoints. If that sounds like a rant about how come they never ask me...it probably is.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:30 PM

Celestial Showtime

A new comet has been discovered. It should put on a decent show for us in the northern latitudes in April. It's already (barely) visible with the naked eye.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:24 PM

Pedophilic Priests

I was just listening to Bush's press conference, and when asked about the problem of pedophilia in the Church (Lord only knows why the reporter thought that this was an issue for the President), he replied something to the effect that he knew many in the Church hierarchy, and that they were men of integrity.

I haven't said much on this issue, but I do have a couple of thoughts. First, I find it curious that many of the same people who claim that being gay is "unnatural" and sinful because it can't result in progeny simultaneously require that their priesthood be celibate, which to my mind is equally, and perhaps even more, "unnatural"...

Second, I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that anyone in the Church hierarchy who helped keep such crimes quiet, and simply transferred transgressors to other parishes to sin again, were aiding and abetting felonies, and engaging in a criminal conspiracy. Is there any reason (legal reason, that is, not political) that they shouldn't be so charged?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:39 PM

Do They Get Federal Benefits, Too?

Others have commented on this, but I can't let it pass. The INS has belatedly issued student visas to Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi to take flying lessons.

They are both, of course, six months deceased, having notoriously flown airplanes into the World Trade Center, sans such visas.

In a related story, President Bush is angry about it.

"The president is very displeased. He wants to know how and why this happened and he wants it fixed," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "This is unacceptable."

Former INS District Director Tom Fischer told CNN that "the letters should never have been sent."

No kidding?

Their delivery, he said, was "a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing."

Can someone remind me, again, just why it was so important and urgent to federalize airport security?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:53 AM

Fun With CCDs

I found this little story over at Natalie Solent's site, about a man who wrecked his digital camera by dunking it in a lake, and now claims to like the results.

Web designer (and high-tech camera designer) Bill Simon comments:

This is classic. In sales it is called turning a bug into a feature.

Okay. Now he has a "magic" camera.

Big deal. All he can take are "magic" pictures. But with a program like Paint Shop Pro, I can make any of my normal pictures as magical as I wish and I still get normal pictures.

This guy doesn't want to face the fact that he wrecked an $800 camera. But with this hype the camera will become worth whatever the new age world can afford...Say, $250,000. So I guess he gets the last laugh.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:40 AM

LA Bloggers Rock

Layne has a good and accurate review of Eugene Volokh's blogger bash last night. No fact checking required.

I want to thank Professor Volokh as well. I had a great time, and it was nice to see that none of my fellow bloggers in attendance actually were dogs, despite the old saying about the Internet...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:04 AM

More Moore

John Strausbaugh goes after him this time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:59 AM

March 12, 2002
Sauce For The Goose...

Eugene Volokh writes at Instantman's site:

Seems to me that if someone who owns a newspaper can editorialize all he wants using his money, then others should be able to rent space in that newspaper (by buying an ad) using their money. And, of course, in the cyberspace age, aren't we all part of "the press"? How can the law sensibly distinguish the L.A. Times, a local business corporation (which has a Web page and a newsletter, and wants to rent time on television), and me?

Yes, I pointed this out a few weeks ago in this post. They want to eat their cake and have it, too. If you can purchase free speech rights by buying and owning a newspaper, why can't you do it by renting one? Why are existing media owners so uniquely privileged?

Even though many reform advocates don't get it, this is exactly why "money = speech," and it is the contradiction on which this horrible law will founder.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:33 PM

Good Money After Bad, Part Deux

Instantman (welcome to California, Glenn!) barely got off the plane at LAX before he dissed my dissing of Salon.

Well, what I was really dissing was not so much Salon's content (though I thought much of it execrable, particularly the Clinton apologia that often reached Gene Lyons and Joe Conason levels during the late nineties). I was criticizing their business model, and their dotcom-like habit of burning money like there was no tomorrow.

So the question is, is there a tomorrow and will Adobe Systems further investment help it arrive, or did they need the writeoff? Maybe they've finally gotten it figured out, but it's not where I'd be putting my money.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:34 PM

The Meme Is Spreading

Apparently the Nigerians are starting to franchise their little scam to eastern Europe. This is the first time I've seen it from this part of the world.

I need your help.

I am the wife of VLAJKO STOJILJKOVIC, one of the people indicted at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal in Hague. The indictment is politically motivated. It was for the package the western worlkd has provided Yogoslavia.

Oh, well glad you cleared that up. We might have thought that he massacred thousands of Croations, or something...

Slobodan and my husband had kept some funds, to enable them take care of rebel problems.

Good thinking and wise planning. You never know when those pesky rebel problems will crop up.

However, now the country they protected has turned against them. I need
to transfer the money out to safety.

Yeah, it's such a pain when those ingrate rebels won't stay bought. I hate when that happens.

The funds are in excess of 100 million (in Swiss Francs and US dollars). They will have to be paid into off shore accounts. They are not in Yugoslav.

Well, if they're not in "Yugoslav," then where are they?

Can you help? Are you capable of handling funds?

Hmmm...let's see... [jingling change in pants pocket], yup, seem to be.

Are you trustworthy?

Sure.

You'll take my word for it, won't you?

I can offer you 30%. Will that be ok?

Only thirty percent? No way.

i will be also needing you expert advice on business oppurtunity,emigration and purchasing of housing for family living.

I am grateful.

But not as grateful as you'll be after I give you my bank account number, I'll bet.

Glorja.

And Glorja to you, too, with a cheerful Hallelujia.

These folks are really rank amateurs compared to those funny Ibos in Lagos. No mention of how they got my name from a trusted source at the State Department, no entreaties to keep this just between you and me...

I'll be interested to see if the quality improves in future.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:39 AM

Moore Piling On

Bloggers aren't the only ones dissing Michael "Stupid White Man" Moore. Check out this editorial in the Rocky Mountain News.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:23 AM

A New Assault Weapon

Someone tell Diane Feinstein. A man has invented a rapid-fire rubber-band machine gun that will spit out a gross of stretchy projectiles as fast as the user can turn the crank.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:53 AM

March 11, 2002
I've Got To Go See Mullah Omar...

Here's an interesting and somewhat amusing article about mental health in Afghanistan.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:17 PM

Good Money After Bad

For some unfathomable reason, Adobe Systems is pouring another half a megabuck into that bottomless hole in the Internet known as Salon.com.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:21 PM

Stuck In The Caribbean

Six months ago today, I'd just gotten back to San Juan from a diving vacation in Bonaire, and was about to get on an American flight back to LA via Dallas. The flight was supposed to leave about 11 AM Atlantic Standard Time (which also happens to be the same time zone as Eastern Daylight Time).

Packed, and waiting for the time to approach at which I was to take a cab to Luis Munoz Marin Airport, I was doing some work on the computer in our apartment in Isla Verde, listening to Fox & Friends on the television. Just as the program was coming to an end at 9 AM, I heard E.D. Donahey announce that they'd just gotten word that a plane had collided with the World Trade Center.

The first thing that crossed my mind was that it must have been a private pilot who lost his way. Was the weather bad? Then I saw the image, and it was clearly a CAVU day (Ceiling And Visibility Unlimited, other than the smoke coming from the fire). Now it was starting to look deliberate--it's hard to come up with a plausible scenario in which someone flies into one of the world's tallest buildings, on a clear sunny morning, by accident, short of a heart attack in the cockpit or something.

As the fire burns, Fox brings in a supposed aviation expert, who assures us (despite my own thoughts) that this is just a navigational problem of some kind--it's very unlikely that it is deliberate. Just as he finishes saying this, I see, in real time, the second plane hit the second tower.

Probably feeling like a fool, the "expert" says something like, "well, now this is starting to look like it's deliberate." Award that man a clue!

We're clearly at war, the only question is with whom.

It's now just twenty minutes or so before I have to decide whether to take a cab to the airport and get on a plane to the mainland. It seems crazy to even bother, but there's been no announcement as to the status of other flights. But fortunately, just about the time that I have to make the decision, they announce that all flights have been grounded. Even if that doesn't include Puerto Rico, I know that no planes are going to depart to Dallas, and if even if it does, I won't get another flight to LA. So I'm now stuck in San Juan indefinitely.

We get word that the Pentagon is hit. I call a business associate in Old Town Alexandria, who has just gotten in to work, and tell him to look out the window. He sees the smoke and flames on the other side of Crystal City.

Now, as I continue to watch, I start musing idly about how I'd get back to LA if I really had to. I'm thinking, I could catch a non-American flight over to Santo Domingo, and then maybe Air Jamaica or something to Tijuana, and then walk across the border. But then I hear that the borders are closed as well.

So, I ended up spending almost another week in Puerto Rico (not a bad thing at all, as Patricia was there). The following Monday, I was on one of the first flights to leave after the fleet grounding. Security was clearly tighter--I had to put my computer through the machine separately, for the first time. The crew on the flight was somber. I wondered if they had lost friends that day...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:20 PM

More Airline Security Insanity

There's a storm brewing over the ongoing airline security fiasco, reported by today's LA Times. More and more people are starting to realize that the cure may be worse than the disease.

Even experts who believe the government is doing as well as can be expected say officials have failed to spell out passengers' responsibilities and rights. Another gap is a lack of clear protocols for dealing with minor incidents. Without such guidelines, even a sarcastic comment from a frustrated traveler can escalate into a federal felony charge.

Yup. Zero tolerance, and zero intelligence.

Unfortunately, Fox News still doesn't seem to get it. I heard them talk about a poll they took as to whether people are still "afraid to fly." Why don't they take a poll to see if people are too disgusted and irritated to fly?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:38 PM

Ingrates

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that we don't just have a problem with Saudi Arabia. We must also decide what to do about Our Friends The Kuwaitis.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:16 PM

March 10, 2002
Bambi Vs PETA

If you missed the classic short film "Bambi Versus Godzilla," here's a true-life adventure almost as good. A couple of PETA members hit a deer with their car in New Jersey. They're suing the state, of course.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:49 PM

OK, Let's Try Something Else

The Democrats have finally given up on trying to inflate Enron into a Republican scandal.

"I'm being very, very careful to say that it's not another Whitewater," said Rep. Henry Waxman, the Democrats' lead investigator into what the White House knew of the debacle, when, and how Enron may have influenced the administration's energy policy plans.

Of course, Mr. Waxman didn't think that Whitewater was a Whitewater...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:18 PM

This Isn't The Way War Is Supposed To Be

Sophomoric is a literal description of this opinion piece by a college student at the University of Connecticut, on how he's tired of the War On Terrorism, now that it's turning into a real war, in which young men like him are dying. I hope that the sheltered life and ignorance of history indicated by this editorial is the exception, and not the rule, for his generation.

War, for most of my life, has been antiseptic - - free of pain and worry.

For most of your life? You say that as though you didn't just fall off the turnip truck yesterday. As though, at the ripe old age of twenty or twenty one, you should have expected to see it all, and to know it all.

When bad guys come a-knockin', we go over, kick some butt and come on back in time for the Super Bowl. Going over to fight in a foreign war (excuse me, "police action") is nothing more than spending a semester abroad. U.S. troops don't die, we don't lose, we're the best! We're the Yankees of international warfare.

And now you're just Shocked, Shocked, to discover that real wars are not just a video game.

I don't know any of the lost souls; none of them come from Connecticut, or even New England. But one name struck me as I read the list. An Army soldier by the name of Pfc. Matthew A. Commons, of Boulder City, Nev. What struck me was not his name, or place of origin. What struck me was his age. He died serving his country at the age of 21.

Hate to break it to you, son, but in army life, twenty one is an old man, often a battle-scarred veteran.

One wonders if this guy's ever read any books about war, like The Red Badge of Courage, or any Hemingway, or even Catch-22. I suspect that they were shoved out of his curriculum for more politically-correct reading fare.

Perhaps it's a function of my age,

Gee, ya think?

or of the nature of this new conflict, but war no longer seems antiseptic to me. It's no longer anonymous soldiers being sent off to fight, it's my friends, family and co-workers. And unlike the Persian Gulf, our soldiers are starting to die..

So, what's your point? Now that American men are dying, it's time to call off the war? It's all right to drop bombs on people you don't know from thirty thousand feet, like a video game, but not to actually play "duck, duck, goose" in a mortar exchange, or engage in hand-to-hand combat?

And golly, some of your friends, family and coworkers might have to go off to die?

Here's a clue, son. I know it's tiresome to have to deal with the old fossils, but go talk to your grandparents, if they're still living, or someone of their generation, if not, and ask them what it was like after Pearl Harbor. When everyone enlisted. When the casualties weren't all reported in the New York Times, because there wouldn't have been enough newsprint and ink for it. When everyone knew someone who was injured, or killed, and the chronicling of their fate was featured in every home town newspaper, for weeks, upon months, upon years.

And no one whined about it, as you are here, because they knew that there was only one way to deal with the Hitlers and Tojos and Stalins of the world, and that if they didn't, the carnage would be even worse, and it wouldn't be just sons and brothers and fathers, but sisters and mothers and daughters, down to the babies.

How soon are military units sent to Iraq, North Korea or Somalia, as President Bush bolsters his approval ratings by pumping more and more money into defense spending? More importantly, what are we looking to accomplish? When will we be safe from terrorism? When we have recognized our foreign policy mistakes, or when we have bombed the very last militant off of the very last mountaintop?

We have recognized our foreign policy mistakes, son. Our foreign policy mistakes were to allow people like bin Laden to think that he could murder innocent people wholesale, and suffer no consequences, partly because we thought that cruise missiles could substitute for eyes and arms on the ground, giving rise to your previous video-game warfare fantasies. And yes, it will be over when we have removed the last terrorist (not militant) from the last mountaintop, or camp, or alley. And that's not going to happen overnight, but you're young--you'll probably see it happen.

For the sake of my friends, and for the sake of the families of the soldiers who have died, I hope the answer lies with the diplomat and not with the gun.

Hope has no power. To the degree that you should be hoping anything, though, you should be hoping that more people don't think as you do, and that others will be willing to take up the challenge, even if you are not, so that your children and grandchildren will have an opportunity to write asinine editorials like yours.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:34 PM

Feedback

Matt Welch has a nice little rant about the disgusting practice of journalists letting their subjects edit their own stories. Fair enough.

But something that I've never understood is most journalists' unwillingness to even allow their subjects to review and comment on the stories prior to publication. If they would do this, there would be many fewer boneheaded articles being written (particularly on matters scientific, but also matters simply factual) by journalists who don't know what they're talking about. I'm not saying that they should have to make changes, or accept editing--just that they should be willing to accept suggestions and use their own judgment as to whether or not to make the changes.

If I were writing an article, I would certainly want to get as much input as possible before finalizing it and avoid making myself look like a fool. I don't understand why journalists don't have that attitude. Is it something in the water in J School?

This problem extends, by the way, to movie directors. I see many stupid, incredible scientific blunders in many movies that are simply pointless. They don't make for a better story, they don't advance the plot, the movie would be dramatically just as good if they get the science right instead of wrong. And it wouldn't make people like me think that they're fools.

And it's not even a matter of not having the expertise available--I've seen really stupid films made, supposedly with consulting by NASA. One suspects that they listen to the advice, shrug their shoulders, and then do it the way they want anyway. They're, after all, the artists--what do those science geeks know?

Unfortunately, there probably aren't enough people (like me) who care for the market to work and punish them sufficiently to get them to change. But the problem is, even if most people don't mind (or notice) that things don't make sense, it simply continues to reinforce scientific ignorance and innumeracy on the part of the populace.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:25 AM

March 09, 2002
Our Friends The Iranians

Afghan interim government forces have arrested Revolutionary Guards caught aiding their own Afghan allies who are attempting to subvert the new government.

Nope, no axis of Evil here...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:25 PM

More Steely Resolve

Bush has now lost Mark Steyn over the IDIOTIC steel tariff decision.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:52 PM

March 08, 2002
Put One On The Barbie

Mark Steyn's been down to Toys bin Us, and he has the latest on all the new culturally-correct Barbies.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:04 PM

Incomprehensible

I hadn't commented on this previously, partly out of disgust, and partly because others had, but there's a new twist on it.

The original story is that a woman hit a man with her car. He flew up on the hood and through the windshield, and was trapped there, bleeding. What did she do? She drove home with him impaled thusly, parked the car in her garage, telling no one, and left him there for two days to die from insanguination and his injuries (coming out occasionally to apologize, but not to offer any assistance whatsoever). After this, she and some associates disposed of the body.

Now, new facts come out, which were previously not reported (at least, I hadn't seen them). She is of African American descent. He was...not.

She reportedly told friends, "I hit this white man."

Now imagine if the skin hues were reversed. This wouldn't be the last fact to be reported--it would be the first. And the NAACP mobs would have been out for blood, screaming in the streets and filling all available media bandwidth with cries for "hate-crime" legislation.

Now, I say this only to point out more evidence of media bias in favor of the race baiters--I don't actually care what color either of them was.

But even without knowing the circumstances of the auto accident, I think that she should be charged not just with hit and run, not just with failure to provide aid and assistance. She should be charged with abduction, torture and murder, and she should be put away for a very long time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:49 PM

Extravaganza On Ice

The tiny town of Nederland, Colorado, is cashing in on the fact that they made Trygve Bauge's life hell several years ago, when he tried to store his cryonically-suspended grandfather there and they made such acts illegal (though they literally "grandfathered" his particular case). They've decided to have a "frozen guy" festival.

I'm not sure how to react to this. At least they're taking it in good humor now, and aren't coming after cryonicists with torches and pitchforks. And as anyone who's ever read the Cryonics mailing list knows, Trygve is kind of a loon.

But it makes light of a serious issue--when is a person really dead, and should the government be making it illegal to try to preserve the information that constitutes a person?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:21 PM

Steely Outrage Of Bush Fans

For those who think that the so-called conservative pundits aren't coming down on Bush with both feet over his STUPID steel tariff decision, check out Tim Blair's Fox News column today, or go listen to Rush Limbaugh, who is fuming.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:14 PM

I'm Shocked, Shocked...

John Weaver, John McCain's long-time political strategist, has decided to switch to Democrat.

What took you so long?

(link only available to subscribers)

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:16 AM

Norm Mineta Knows Best

I made the mistake of listening to NPR again this morning, and they had a story about airline security that had me chewing ten-penny nails, due to both the story itself, and their coverage of it.

I only caught the tail end, but apparently some federal Air Marshals arrived late for an American flight, and tried to commandeer seats in first class, insisting that the passengers whose seats they wanted be put off the plane. Their excuse was that they needed to be able to see the cockpit. The airline had given them aisle seats in the front of coach, with a clear view, but that wasn't good enough for them. Perhaps they wanted to get the free booze, to complement their intoxication with power. The airline didn't let them get away with it, but it wasn't clear what the outcome was (the story's over at NPR in audio, but my sound card is on the fritz right now).

But what really fried me was the ending. The reporter says that there's an inherent tension between the government, which wants to fight terrorism, and the airlines, who want to generate revenue.

She really said it, just like that. As though the airline has no intrinsic interest in fighting terrorism, as though they'd cheerfully set up charter flights full of Al Qaeda operatives, even help them plan the flight, from takeoff to skyscraper, as long as they got paid.

She got it precisely reversed, of course. The airlines are taking a balanced approach--they are interested in both fighting terrorism and staying in business, whereas the government, at least if we are to judge by its actions, has no interest in the financial health of the industry whatsoever.

This reminds me of the old arguments about how we needed more government regulation on aircraft maintenance and procedures, because in its absence, the airlines would cut corners, and skimp, and crash airplanes, and kill people.

It never seems to occur to these nimrods that crashing airplanes is bad for business. For some unaccountable reason, people don't like to fly on airlines whose planes fall out of the sky with any regularity. Insurance carriers won't give very good rates to airlines whose airplanes have to be replaced often. Airlines will have trouble hiring employees who feel that they're taking their lives in their hands on every trip.

No one has more incentive than an airline to make an aircraft safe, whether from mechanical failure, or from nutballs with box cutters.

On the other hand, government bureaucrats will fanatically seek safety, to the exclusion of all else, including the rights of passengers and their willingness to tolerate the disastrous state of air travel today, because they know that if there is another hijacking, they'll be blamed, particularly now that air security has been made a federal responsibility.

But no bureaucrat will suffer if an airline goes under--there are too many other excuses that they can use to deflect blame.

And no bureaucrat will lose his job because of marketing trips not made, hands not shaken, deals not done, acquaintances not made, wealth and jobs not created, because it's just gotten to be too much of a pain in the ass to fly. But the damage to the economy will continue unabated and silently.

This is another reason why the federalization of this function has been, and is going to continue to be, so disastrous for the industry--there's no counterbalance to the madness.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:41 AM

Afflicting The Uncomfortable

Lileks is disturbingly, invariably good, but today's bleat is great. Particularly the part about Our Boy Ted.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:20 AM

March 07, 2002
Bellicose Coeds

Here's a little whining in the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record about the fact that handguns have become fashionable among coeds at Mt. Holyoke.

Defenders of guns can intelligently argue that, as with fast cars, the pleasures of gun ownership are worth the increased mortality. That is an opinion with which one can agree or disagree. Likewise, it is true that the overwhelming majority of guns will be used responsibly (from the point of view of everyone except hungry coyotes). But it is pointless to try to deny the link between more handguns and increased murder and suicide.

Pointless? I suppose. Unless you're actually familiar with the data and statistics...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:50 PM

NRA's Candidate Loses In CA

It seems that the White House wasn't the only one to back the wrong horse in the Republican primary. The NRA apparently screwed up as well--it was urging its members to vote for Bill Jones. Presumably, they didn't take Simon seriously enough, and thought that the race was between Jones and Riordan. Then, even after it became clear that Simon was the Second-Amendment candidate with the best chance, they didn't want to go back on their endorsement, but risked splitting the conservative vote.

They've gotten themselves a black eye with a lot of conservatives in California as a result. One expects that they'll now endorse Simon for the general election.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:21 PM

Another Riordan Autopsy

I don't agree with Dan Weintraub that often, but I think that he's nailed it here:

Way ahead in the early polls, Riordan expected a coronation but found himself in an election instead. He ran as a leader and a competent manager. But given the way he managed his own campaign, or failed to, it's probably best that he'll never get the chance to run the state.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:31 PM

Economics For Not-So-Dummies

Someone should suggest to Ira Stoll that he add Megan McArdle as a columnist to counter the idiocy from Krugman over at the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:04 PM

More Good News For Bill Simon

The budget crisis in Sacramento may affect California's bond ratings with S&P. This bombshell will hit this summer, when people are starting to pay attention to the race.

While Davis is indeed a vicious campaigner, I don't think that anything that he can do at this point can reverse his negatives in peoples' minds. The Republicans could probably run Goofy against him and win in November. Simon is still ahead in the latest Field Poll (though it's within the margin of error).

But when an incumbent can only get 40% support for reelection right after the primary, he's in deep, deep kimchi.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:54 PM

Real-Time Rall

He's about to be interviewed on Fox News.

[a few minutes later]

He looks almost like a normal person. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I always imagine him as looking like one of his own characters (his art imitates his life, as it were).

His excuse is that he wasn't going after the bereaved, per se--just the ones who have put themselves in the news and gone on Larry King.

According to him, we're just too dumb to understand the nuance of his art.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:39 PM

Another Space Tourist?

According to Space.com, Lori Garver, former National Space Society director, and NASA Associate Administrator (and a friend of mine) is angling for a seat in a Soyuz. I hope she can pull it off. She's likely to do more for public space travel than any of the others who are trying to go.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:17 AM

Ghost Towns In San Jose

There's an interesting article in the Orange County Register about high-tech ghost towns in Silicon Valley, many of them only recently built.

The amount of excess capacity up there right now is staggering, but it may lay the foundation for a good recovery, once people figure out how to actually make money off the Internet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:02 AM

What Do You Mean, "We," White Man?

The Lone Ranger may be returning to the big screen--with a female Tonto.

I'm sure those fussy, anti-cowboy Europeans will have a fit over this.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:33 AM

More Airline Security Imbecility

From ABC.

Drew Carey was forced to make changes in a script that poked fun at airport security. Apparently he was going to have the congenitally-incompetent Lewis and Oswald get jobs as security guards. Sounds like good casting to me. But I guess ABC isn't into "reality TV."

Note that the story is being reported by MSNBC...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:08 AM

Novak On Riordan

Bob Novak provides some more interesting background on Riordan's electoral slapdown.

I wasn't previously aware of this, but apparently (and bizarrely), Riordan was actually proud of his RINO label. And for people who thought that he was a conservative Republican in 1992, check this out:

I first met Riordan, a fabulously rich businessman, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. His suggestions for urban peace sounded sensible but not very conservative. In passing, he informed me he was about to run for mayor the next year. He indicated he would not stress his Republican affiliation in seeking the non-partisan mayoralty in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

He was true to his word, even after entering the mayor's office. Apart from flashing his RINO button, he fawned over President Bill Clinton, endorsed Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein for re-election and avoided Republican Party functions. He was so excessive in praising the way Federico Pena handled the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake as Clinton's secretary of Transportation that he suggested Pena would make a good president.

Riordan has no one to blame for his loss but himself.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:56 AM

Yet Another Peaceful Religion

An eleven-year-old boy in Omaha, dressed as Jesus for a school function, got into a fight with another boy who called him "Little Bo Peep" and "Heidi."

Guess he hadn't gotten to the part of the book about turning the other cheek yet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:43 AM

Ralling With The Punches

I haven't said anything about the now-famous penned atrocity that Ted Rall had pulled from the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper of Record, but Protein Wisdom has been battering him pretty steadily, and hilariously for the past couple days. Today, they reprise the earlier Anne Coughman slicing and dicing of his monumentally stupid scribblings of a couple months ago.

Boy, I hope that I never get on her bad side...

But as long as we're doing greatest hits, and using Teddy boy for target practice, here's my take on him from my Media Casualties piece:

"For some, a lucky few, catatonia is a blessed escape. One poor wretch named Ted just sits up in his bed all day. His brow is furrowed, and his eyes are unfocused, or focused on some distant unreality, unseeable by the rest of us.

Old newsroom veterans call it the 'thousand-word stare.' They've all seen it--that look you get as you gaze intently at a blank computer screen, in a futile attempt to conjure up some words that will somehow spin an obvious and just victory into humiliating and immoral failure.

He had been leading a frontal assault on common sense, when he was cut down in a withering fire of logic and irony by a brigade of blogger sharpshooters and fact checkers. The hits were effective, but not always clean. He lived, but his syntax was badly mangled, and his credibility was shattered beyond any hope of salvaging it."

But somehow, he keeps getting up, and coming back for more. Masochist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:55 AM

March 06, 2002
No Pain, No Gain

Yesterday's Opinion Journal had a piece by Ralph Peters on how the fact that we are now seeing more casualties in Afghanistan is a "good" thing.

While at first reading, such a statement sounds appalling, I agree, in the relative sense of the word "good." That the casualties have so far been low has possibly been an indicator that our war strategy has been insufficiently aggressive, and insufficiently...effective. Many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have killed some of our troops, and who we are now destroying, escaped from Tora Bora last fall, when we relied on Afghan troops to corral them, rather than putting our own at risk. Tragically, but necessarily, some of our own are dying now so that future others, perhaps in the thousands, or millions, many of them women and children, will live.

Risk-averse strategies can fail in many spheres--not just military campaigns. In the training and fitness industry, there's an old saying (crass though it may sound in the context of dedicated soldiers who will never come home to their families...) of "no pain, no gain."

And any competent financial analyst can describe the indisputable and inevitable relationship between risk and reward. That's why junk bonds pay a much higher interest rate than the debt of blue-chip stocks, or why startup firms offer a potentially much larger rate of return--with the corresponding chance that the entire investment may evaporate.

The same principle applies to research and development. Over the years, particularly since the Challenger disaster, NASA has become risk averse to the point of impotence. They will spend billions of taxpayer dollars in analysis, to avoid an outright and telegenic failure, even if the goal of the program itself is not achieved.

As an example, consider the X-34 program. It was supposed to produce a vehicle that would demonstrate the ability to fly hypersonically, reliably, as a major step on the way to affordable space access. (Unfortunately, NASA insisted that the contractor use an engine developed by NASA, which they later said was never intended to be a usable engine).

After the vehicle was mostly developed (minus the engine that the vehicle had been designed for, per NASA specifications), and NASA had a failure in a Mars mission, the agency decided that X-34 lacked sufficient redundancy and safety to fly. When they got an estimate of how much it would cost to add these (unnecessary) modifications to add the required redundancy, NASA decided instead to cancel the program.

Result? The vehicle never flew.

And the data obtained from it?

Zero.

All because NASA was unwilling to risk a failure of an experimental vehicle (the purpose of which is to determine whether or not a particular technology is viable or worth pursuing further).

If you want to know why only governments can afford spaceflight, seek no further than the outcome of this program...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:40 PM

Is It Wrong To Break The Law?

There seems to be a subtle point missing in much of the discussion of Andrea Yates' sanity.

Yes, she called the police because she knew that drowning her children like so many kittens in a sack was illegal. But if she (insanely, in my humble opinion) thought that the alternative was to consign them to hell, then she also thought that what she was doing was not wrong.

My opinion--she's mad as a hatter (or at least she was on the day that she murdered her kids). She's probably not a danger to society at this point, but she should get years of confined therapy, and never be allowed to bear any more children.

But the larger point is that all that is immoral is not necessarily illegal, nor should it be. And vice versa. Yes, we all know that killing your own children is wrong, but not simply because there's a law against it. And not all things that are illegal (such as not reporting the location of Jews in Nazi Germany) are wrong.

And the point of this post is that, just because Andrea Yates reported her crime to the authorities, and was willing to accept the consequences, it does not mean that she properly understood the moral implications of her act.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:24 PM

Condolences

I've been as hard on the EU as anyone in blogdom, but I want to extend my most profound sympathy to the families of the German and Danish (and any others of which I'm unaware) soldiers who were killed in Kabul, in defense of civilization.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:10 PM

Pioneer, Phone Home

This is pretty neat. After over twenty years, it's still possible to communicate with Pioneer 10, even though it's almost seven and a half billion miles away (twice the distance to Pluto, the most distant planet) and far outside our solar system. It took over twenty-two hours for the signal to be received and acknowledged. From there, the sun is just another bright star, and there is no heat for the spacecraft except what it can still generate from its depleting plutonium power generator.

This would not have been possible if it had had any other than a nuclear power source.

The numbers involved here are staggering. It's so far away, and the signal so diffuse, that by the time it reaches the earth, it has a power of only ten to the minus 20th or so watts. That's 0.00000000000000000001 (that's nineteen zeros after the decimal point). But we can still pick up the signal, using the huge dishes in places like Goldstone in California.

And the data rate is probably excruciatingly low.

Given the ability to get just a few bits through, I wonder what the conversation was...

Ground: Hello, Pioneer. Are you out there?

Pioneer: Yes.

Ground: How are you doing?

Pioneer: How do you think I'm doing? I'M FREEZING IN THE DARK! What did you think you were doing, sending me all the way out here?! And why don't you ever write?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:44 PM

Yippie Yi, Yi Yo...

The EU is understandably upset by the Bush tariffs on steel (well, partially understandably--it's not like they're exactly innocent of subsidies and other market interference). I am also.

But I found this headline bizarre:

EU condemns Bush's 'Wild West' steel tariffs

What do steel tariffs have to do with the "wild west"?

This is like when they were calling Bush a "cowboy" because he wouldn't go along with Kyoto or ABM.

Just what is it with Europeans and the American West? Is it too emblematic of individualism? Is it the guns? Do they hate non-metric ten-gallon hats? Were they scared by a cow when they were young?

What?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:26 PM

I'll Take The Bet, Matt

I've already gone on the blogrecord with a prediction of a Simon win in November, but if Mr. Welch wants to make it interesting, I'm game. Just state the terms.

And I don't think that I'm "genetically-predisposed" against Mr. Riordan ("Mrs. Simberg, you have a bouncing baby boy. And he came out of the womb holding a sign saying 'Simon For Governor.' Just like his daddy..."). No, it's based on my observations and experience.

While I'm not a "rabid right-winger" (I'd be sure to fail the test on the gay, drugs, evolution, cloning, and immigration issues, among many others), I can certainly understand why Republicans would be loathe to support someone who funds the campaigns of rabid left wingers (like Maxine Waters), who thinks the minimum wage is too low, who doesn't even seem to know where he stands on abortion, who has no problem with confiscatory taxes or gun laws, whose own wife can't vote for him in the primary because she's a registered Democrat...

I can understand why Democrats would like to vote for Riordan against Davis, but I have trouble figuring out why Republicans would want to bother. And as the Democrats should have learned in the Bush-McCain primary battle, Republicans like to choose their own candidates, and not those that some members of the opposite party want them to choose.

And I have to assume that Mr. Welch is just pulling our collective legs when he says:

I wish I could give all the ?Riordan isn?t a Republican? crowd copies of the LA Weekly from 1992, when Mayor Dick was presented as the most craven of influence-peddling, Old Guard Catholic, right-wing rights-abusing firebreather we?d seen in a generation.

Really? The LA Weekly? In 1992? Presenting anyone to the right of Tom Hayden as an Attila-the-Hun reactionary? I'm shocked...just shocked.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:29 PM

More Free-Enterprise Space Support

The meme of free-enterprise space activities continues to spread. The lastest example is a piece by Radley Balko over at Tech Central Station.

My main critique is that his title ("Lost In Space") is a little trite and overused.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:18 AM

March 05, 2002
Forests And Trees

I think that the media are missing the big story up in "Condit Country." The amazing thing is not that he lost, but that sixteen thousand people voted for him...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:23 PM

The Good Guy Wins

Now that it's become clear that Riordan has been blown out in the Republican primary, I just want to say...

YYYYEEEESSSSSS!!!

Riordan was the "moderate Democrats'" last great hope to defeat Gray Davis, who even they couldn't stomach.

Sorry, folks, but the notion that Riordan had a better chance than Simon against Davis in November is a myth (and one that the Davis camp bought into, which will accrue to their great regret next fall).

No real Republican was going to vote for Riordan, had he won the nomination. They would have voted for a third-party candidate, or stayed home.

Yes, Simon will have an uphill battle in California, but now, at least the Republican Party is energized in a way that it never could have been by Maxine-Waters-contributing, no-fire-in-the-belly Dick Riordan. Riordan would have lost for sure. Simon has a chance. This is a blog, and my words are recorded for history. November will make me, or break me.

I do regret, however, Gary Condit's loss of the Democratic primary. I was hoping for his loss in the general election. This was a Dem win.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:16 PM

But Has He Seen Me Lately?

I want to thank Glenn for pointing out that my knuckles don't drag (and Richard Bennett, for implying that they do--as long as he spells the URL right...). Well, maybe on the keyboard...

Anyway, higher praise than that no man can ask.

And actually, I was pointing to Free Republic primarily for entertainment value (which it always provides, on several levels)--not to buttress my own arguments.

And Richard, really...

Astute politicians know how to navigate these new political waters, as Riordan did in LA...

It is to laugh. "Astute politicians" don't spit in the face of the core constituency of their party, as Riordan did. McCain made the same mistake. They also don't willfully give copious campaign donations, and aid and comfort, to the opposite party. I mean, come on, he gave donations to Maxine Waters. And you call that an astute Republican politician?

It's possible to run as a moderate without demonizing your own base, but Dick Riordan sure didn't know how to do it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:19 PM

A Beautiful Anti-Semitic Mind

Matt Drudge says that John Nash's opinions about Jews might cost Ron Howard an Oscar win.

Yeah, we'll just rewrite history to make it a love story, and not mention the first wife, the homosexual liaisons, or the Jew hating...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:19 PM

More Lunacy From The Land Of The Pyramids

Check out these ravings from an Egyptian columnist. He compares Gitmo to Auschwitz. We're broiling the prisoners alive in the searing tropical sun. It sounds like he's spent a little too long in the sun himself.

Oh, and did you know that Dick Cheney is a
"super-racist Jew"? Amazing what you can learn when you read the foreign papers.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:05 PM

Man Of Steel? Or Cardboard?

There was always one policy area in which I thought the Clinton Administration did a reasonably good job, or, at least, had relatively-reasonable policy positions--trade policy.

Now the Bush Administration, after being on a hot streak of superior performance over the previous one, has stumbled badly.

At least Bill Clinton seemed to believe in free trade. It sickened me just now to hear Ari Fleischer trotting out the economically-ignorant phrase "fair trade."

Will anyone point out how many jobs this will cost us, or how many jobs won't be created as a result of this Administration's spineless refusal to explain and defend the Law of Comparative Advantage?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:57 AM

Missing CATS Update

As regular readers will recall, someone was posting to the Cheap Access To Space (CATS) BBS looking for his lost felines.

It turns out he's even more clueless than we thought.

According to his website (sorry, no link--this is second-hand info), he's trying to set up a no-kill, no-confinement shelter for cats. No confinement. For cats. And he wonders why they keep going missing...

Also, he's upset because the Humane Society keeps taking his cats away. Apparently, he's decided to run for governor of "Minnessoeda" to solve the problem.

Well, if Jesse Ventura can win...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:05 AM

Suicidal California Elephants?

I don't think so.

Ken Layne's latest Fox News column is up. He (an admitted Democrat-turned-temporary-Republican) bemoans the fact that California Republicans seem suicidal because they won't nominate a Democrat (Riordan) to run against Grayout Davis.

Well, he's right that California Republicans like to lose, but it's not because they nominate conservative candidates. It's because they take occasionally idiotic policy positions (like Prop 187), or nominate candidates who are even more colorless than Gray (e.g., Matt Fong, Pete Wilson).

If running as a liberal/moderate was such a great idea, why did Mike Huffington lose, Ken? Bruce Herschenson was the last interesting candidate that they ran in my memory, and he came close to beating Barbara Boxer. He primarily lost because it was "the year of the (Democratic) woman," and some last-minute dirty tricks.

Anyway, sorry, Ken, win or lose in November (I actually think he's got a good shot, given the quality of the opposition, the lingering memories of the energy fiasco, and the changed mood of the country) Bill Simon is almost certainly going to be the Republican nominee. And it's not because Republicans like to lose. It's because they like to run Republicans--particularly Republicans who don't go out of their way to sneer at the base.

[Update at 11:13 AM PST]

Joseph Britt agrees with Ken, and disagrees with me.

California conservatives are much happier complaining about liberals than actually exercising power themselves.

You don't exercise power as a conservative by electing a Richard Riordan. To a conservative (a category in which I don't place myself, by the way), Riordan is actually to the left of Davis on many issues. They just don't see the point.

The GOP primary wouldn't even have been close if they'd thrown their weight behind Bill Jones, but he wasn't pure enough or rich enough.

Blame the White House for that. Riordan is their creation. Now they're desperately making overtures to Simon, since they can read the handwriting. Simon will be a much stronger candidate than Jones, partly for the same reason he's trouncing Jones--he can bring his own money to the table.

With Rudy's endorsement, and Bush coming out here to campaign for him, and the upcoming budget battles in Sacramento, in which Davis will be blamed for the lack of funds due to his idiotic energy deals, I think that almost anyone will be able to knock him off this fall.

[Another update at 11:30 AM PST]]

The folks over at Free Republic are masticating Ken's column and spitting it out. Many are making the same points that I do (though in a less genteel way). But then, I like Ken...

[Yet another update, at 11:46 AM PST]

Hugh Hewitt weighs in as well (on the race--not on Ken's column)--he's for Simon as well, and says why:

I decided on Simon after interviewing all three GOP candidates on my radio program last week. He's upbeat, energized, ready to answer baseless attacks, and he doesn't condescend to the voter. After the attacks on America, Simon is an almost ideal candidate to deliver the big three: honor, candor, and purpose. Simon will not only run strong in California, he's a perfect new face for the GOP nationally as well.

The central issue in California in 2002 is the almost breathtaking incompetence of Gray Davis, a career political hack who found himself in the biggest job in the state and froze. On issue after issue Davis has fumbled the ball and called it a touchdown. He believes he can spin himself out of his disastrous handling of the state power shortage and his mismanagement of the state's budget. "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" is not a question for voters, it's a laugh line. As the Simon campaign reminds people, Davis' slogan four years ago was "Experience money can't buy." Now we know why --there'd be no takers, period.

So Davis will attack, and attack, and attack. Here is where the real Reagan parallel comes in. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter was surrounded by the ruins of his first term in office and confronting an upbeat optimist from the West Coast in Reagan. So Carter attacked, again and again, and tried to persuade America that Reagan was a reckless ideologue. But 1980 was one of those years in which the American voter was unwilling to be spun. Americans were held hostage, and a war had broken out in Afghanistan. It was time for a change, and a big one. Reagan won in a walk.

Sound familiar? If Bill Simon stays upbeat and on message, if he focuses on California's tottering economy and collapsed schools, and if he conveys the same wide-open embrace of all hard-working Americans, the worst governor in California's history will also be the first one in a century to lose his first campaign for re-election.

[Yet another update, at 1 PM PST]

Richard Bennett comments:

California's not the same state it was in the Reagan Era, it's not even the same state is was the Pete Wilson Era -- a lot of the Mexicans that Wilson went loopy over have registered to vote, and they take great pleasure in voting. It's not the same state it was in 1994 when Reeps won a majority in the Assembly, either. But it's still a state where most Republican voters believe that the Governor's job has something to do with Roe v. Wade or the Second Amendment.

Well, it's not just Republican voters who seem to believe that. And they aren't asking for a governor to do anything with the Second Amendment--they just want one who will recognize its existence, and support things like e.g., concealed carry, and oppose things like state "assault weapon" bans.

In a democracy, we get the government we deserve; since Reeps nominated Dan Lungren last time, that means we get Gray. In a Simon- Davis matchup, as soon as the Dems learn that Simon has never held office and is ardently anti-abortion, we're gonna deserve four more years of Gray as our penalty for being stupid.

If being anti-abortion is a problem, then it must mean that Democrat and independent voters also believe that a governor has something to do with Roe v Wade. I think that he can get around this problem, if he has competent campaign managers.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:24 AM

Unmentionables

I don't normally quote Professor Reynolds, because I know that almost everyone visits his site before they come here, but I just loved this simile:

...it shines through their reporting like too-small Hanes through the seat of a cheap suit.

One wonders idly, though, if he has any personal experience with such a phenomenon...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:54 AM

Bravenet Problems

For those of you who use bravenet.com as your hit counter, I notice that some of you don't have the image sized in your HTML. If you put in an image in a page, with no size, the page will delay the load until it gets the image, because it doesn't know how much real estate to allocate it in the browser display.

If you add the parameters "height=xxx width=yyy" where xxx is the image height in pixels, and yyy the width, as parameters to the "img src=..." tag, you might be able to get around the bravenet delay, even when bravenet is down. For instance, if you "view source" on my code, you'll see that my tip bucket is explicitly sized, so that the page loads quickly even if Amazon is slow in responding (which it occasionally is).

Unfortunately, I don't know the size for the Bravenet hit counter myself, but if you can find the image somewhere, and load it into a graphics program, it will tell you the size.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:12 AM

One More Reason That Bill Jones Will Lose Today's Primary

California Republican gubernatorial primary candidate Bill Jones has had his web site shut down by his service provider because he was sending out spam.

Boo hoo.

"I have concerns about an Internet provider who is stifling free political speech a week before the election," said Sean Walsh, Jones' deputy campaign manager. "This is an intelligent, thoughtful and appropriate way to campaign."

Let's parse this. For "...stifling free political speech..." read "...unwilling to involuntarily spew millions of spam emails to people who aren't even eligible to vote..." For "intelligent, thoughtful and appropriate" read "...obnoxious, stupid, and counter-productive..."

With idiots like this running his campaign, it's no wonder he's tanking.

My money's still on Simon. And I have hopes for him in the general election as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:52 AM

March 04, 2002
Wacky Anti-Saddam-Whacker

R.C. Longworth, advertised as a "Tribune senior correspondent," stunk up the Windy City yesterday with this bit of blithering idiocy, in which he counsels against the danger of taking out Saddam:

Well, that was a tidy little war in Afghanistan. We won, more or less. Not many casualties, and we caught a few of those Al Qaeda guys, if not the big shots.

Yeah, but if I google you, I'm betting you didn't predict that outcome.

What's next? Why, Iraq, of course. It's time to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Everyone agrees. So why not?

Actually, there are lots of reasons why not. But Washington seems so intent on attacking Iraq, as the first point on President Bush's "axis of evil," that bombs will be falling on Baghdad before any questions are asked or objections raised.

Really? Well, by my count, questions have been asked, and objections raised, from you and your ilk, for months. Ever since, in fact, you realized that whining about Afghanistan was beating a dead horse, and the outlines of the next target came into focus, way back last fall. And not a bomb has fallen on Baghdad yet. So your silly prediction has already been grossly falsified.

The United States is racing toward a war with Iraq on the assumption that we can topple Hussein quickly, with relatively few casualties, no impact on oil supplies, no damage to our relations with the rest of the world, no serious domestic opposition, and no hitches in putting a post-Hussein Iraq back together again.

No, the United States is proceeding calmly and resolutely toward a war with Iraq, in full knowledge that some or all of those things may not be the case, but that the risks of not doing so exceed the risk that it won't be as easy or clean as we might like. From just what planet is it that you email in these stupid little screeds to Chicago?

All this is debatable, to say the least. But the administration seems determined, and the Democratic opposition has been quieted by the president's 83 percent approval ratings. In short, although questions emerged in the past week about the president's long-term plans, nobody in Washington is saying, "Wait a minute."

This was written (or at least published) yesterday. Were you holed up in a cave somewhere last week, when Tom Daschle and Bob Byrd were castigated for doing just that?

If there are doubts beyond the Beltway, they aren't being heard in any coordinated way. Memories of Sept. 11 remain fresh. The nation, terribly wounded but still dangerous, seems ready to lash out at its enemies, wherever they are.

For "lash out at its enemies," read "take preemptive action against those who have stated their desire and intent to see us dead, and have the means to make it happen."

Administration officials talk approvingly of a national "war fever" that gives Bush a free hand in eradicating the "axis of evil." Public opinion polls back this up. One of the most recent, by the Pew Research Center, showed that 92 percent of Americans endorse military force in the war on terrorism and no less than 73 percent want to see us attack Iraq--and Sudan too.

Well, it's not surprising that they approve of the fact that they have public support for actions that they believe that they would have to take, even if the polls were reversed.

What's your point? Do you have one?

As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "If we have to go into 15 or more countries, we ought to do it."

This amounts to a mandate for permanent war in which dissent is treason.

Yes, the prisons are overflowing with the dissenters we've been rounding up. They're even having to let out murderers, drug users, and cigarette executives to make room for them.

[VOICE="Dr. Evil"]
Riiiggghhhht...
[/VOICE]

Haven't you noticed in your hysteria, Mr. Longworth, that we haven't even charged Johnny "Jihad" Walker Lindh with treason? And he had actually taken up arms against us.

No wonder doubts are hushed, even among opposition Democrats such as Al Gore who have abandoned their duty to oppose in favor of a national wartime consensus. If the administration thinks Americans want war, it may be right.

Gee, ya think?

Or it may be wrong. Pollsters say in-depth polling and focus groups indicate that this support is softer than the raw figures suggest. Mounting anecdotal evidence supports this.

Good ol' anecdotal evidence. The last refuge of the scoundrel without real evidence.

About 20 prominent Chicagoans gathered recently for a private dinner to hear an emissary from the Eastern Establishment lay out the administration's case for a war on Iraq. It was a conservative crowd--lawyers, business people, bankers, a sprinkling of academics, even a retired army general. All probably supported the war in Afghanistan, and there wasn't a card-carrying dove in the lot.

Did you check their cards?

Somewhat to their own surprise, these citizens lined up unanimously against a war on Iraq. All agreed the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein. But all felt that a U.S. attack on him would do more harm than good, for a variety of reasons.

They "felt" that, eh? Once more with feeling. Feeeelllliiinngggs...wo wo wo Feeeellliiinnngggsss...

First, Hussein's terrorist credentials are pretty theoretical. The idea of attacking him arose after Sept. 11, and the administration has made him a target in the war on terrorism. Certainly, he has a fearsome arsenal of weapons. But there is no evidence that he has used them against the United States or plans to do so. Evil he may be, but few people think he is so crazy as to jeopardize his hold on Iraq--his overwhelming political goal--by inviting an all-out U.S. attack.

No, he'll just slip some weapons to some other people to attack us (you know, like when his head of security met with the Al Qaeda guy in Prague last year?). And perhaps you've forgotten about that little assassination attempt on Bush 41?

Nawww, Saddam's just a regular guy. He'd never do anything to hurt the United States.

The one link between Iraq and the September attacks is a reported but unsubstantiated meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, between an Iraqi agent and one of the suicide pilots--a flimsy justification for a pre-emptive war.

Now here is where you and your idiotarian fellow travelers in Europe go completely off the rails. And you display the confusion right here in this one sentence. First you talk about the September attacks, as though we can never take action against someone unless they can be proven to be related to that particular event.

Then, in the very same sentence you talk about "pre-emptive war." But if it's a pre-emptive war, what does it have to do with September 11? Pre-emptive means to fend off future attacks, not to avenge past ones.

So this sentence is simply a long oxymoron (as opposed to its writer, who is apparently just the simple, unmodified kind).

"Iraq is going to be a major distraction from the war on terrorism, not a part of it," one lawyer said.

Oh, good. That's who we need war advice from.

Lawyers.

You know, like the one who told them in Afghanistan that we couldn't take out Mullah "Cyclops" Omar when we had a chance. Might not be strictly legal, you know.

The Chicagoans' dissent was no bleat of Midwestern isolationism. Just the opposite. All valued America's alliances, in Europe and the Middle East especially, and felt that a unilateral attack on Iraq would shred those alliances, turning the U.S. from a global leader, respected by its allies, into a global bully feared by its subjects. (Seventy-three percent of Americans may favor an attack, but opposition in Europe runs between 68 percent and 80 percent, depending on the poll.)

Ahhh...note that he presents no evidence for this point of view--the bizarre notion that denizens of the heartland actually value alliances with militarily-impotent and morally-challenged European elites over defending the country. Or that they're overly concerned about the U.S. becoming a "global bully."

I think that this is what psychologists refer to as "projection."

The administration says the Europeans and the Arabs will support a U.S. attack "when they see we are serious." This is unproven wishful thinking. So is the claim, by Richard Perle, a leading hawk, that other Arab nations privately tell us that they want Hussein gone and that his ouster by U.S. arms "would be met by dancing in the streets."

Well, not to gainsay someone who is obviously a premier expert in "wishful thinking," but that seems to be the trend so far.

Why worry?

In fact, the only nation interested in attacking Hussein--us--is the one farthest from him. Why, asked one Chicagoan, should the United States worry about him when those closest to his threat, especially the other Arabs, don't?

Because he's managed to cow the other Arabs into feigning support for him? Because they're afraid that if he goes, their little theocratic dictatorships might be next?

There are lots of potential reasons that have nothing to do with our national security, but why explore them?--it would just remove whatever little air there is to his pointless comment.

"I'm stunned by the enthusiasm of the administration for this war and the growing unanimity among military thinkers for it," a local expert on the Middle East said. "There's going to be a huge Arab backlash."

Like the one when we went into Afghanistan? I could dig out all the predictions. You know, the "Arab street"? The ones that we haven't heard boo from since the daisies were cut? Was this one of those experts?

The word from Washington is that any attack on Iraq is probably six or seven months away, because it will be more complicated than the relatively easy assault on Afghanistan.

An Afghanistan-style attack, with air strikes supporting mostly opposition forces, won't work in Iraq, where the local opposition is weaker and the government forces stronger than the ones in Afghanistan. According to Washington hawks, an American ground force of 100,000 to 200,000 soldiers, possibly more, would be needed. This, we are assured, would guarantee victory within a month, with American casualties limited to about 1,000 dead and wounded.

We are assured by whom? I haven't seen any firm plans. Is Mr. Longworth privy to some classified briefings?

To some of the Chicagoans, these forecasts sounded like government assurances during the Vietnam War.

"...some of the Chicagoans..." Gotta love those sources.

Others wondered where the Pentagon expects to find staging areas for these ground troops. Carrier groups can provide a home base for an air war, but you can't launch tanks from an aircraft carrier.

Only those who are unfamiliar with geography and politics.

Washington seems certain that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other neighboring nations will gladly play launching pad to this American attack. On Kuwait, that view may be right. The rest are much more uncertain.

I haven't seen any such certainty. Has the author never heard of Turkey? Has he considered that Saudi Arabia may play launching pad without doing so "gladly"? We are at war, after all...

It is an article of faith among the hawks that there is a ready-made anti-Hussein coalition in Iraq that can be quickly mobilized to plant a functioning democracy in what is perhaps the most undemocratic country in the most undemocratic part of the world. As Robert Kagan and William Kristol have written: "The United States will have to make a long-term commitment to rebuilding Iraq . . . and put it on a path toward democratic governance."

To the Chicagoans, this sounds like a quagmire.

I think he's channeling again. I will give him credit for getting this far into the article before using the "Q" word, though.

Most strategists consider the best-known Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, to be a joke. Even supporters of an invasion warn that the U.S. will be left "owning" a shattered country of 23 million people.

A joke. Kind of like that barrel of laughs, the Northern Alliance?

Putting Iraq back together again would cost American taxpayers about $10 billion dollars per year for a decade. Simply running Iraq and keeping it from breaking into fiefdoms, each with its own cache of leftover chemical weapons, would be an international nightmare.

Why is that? I thought they had oil.

If the war goes on longer than predicted, or if the casualties mount, or if the war against terrorism turns into a war against the Arab world, or if post-Hussein Iraq becomes an ungovernable mess, or if the Americans can't catch Hussein (as we can't find Osama bin Laden)--if any of these things happen, domestic support for an Iraq adventure will dry up fast.

If, if, if...

Yes, if it were an "adventure," indeed it would. In fact, it wouldn't even occur in the first place. But of course, if and when we go into Iraq, it won't be as an "adventure." It will be to remove a clear and present threat that Mr. Longworth, who sees so clearly all the "ifs," remains blind to, regardless of the fact that it is not an "if," but rather, an "is."

The best argument for attacking Iraq is the danger that Hussein is close to acquiring nuclear weapons and using both them and chemical weapons against his neighbors or against us.

But even Kagan and Kristol admit that "no one knows how close Saddam is to having a nuclear de-vice."

Perle agrees: "How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even? We simply do not know."

Candid ignorance, while endearing, is a feeble battle cry.

Yes, since we don't know if it's tomorrow, or the day after, or even next year, we should simply let sleeping Saddams lie. The fact that we know that he is developing them is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that we don't have his exact schedule and project management plan in hand, and therefore we should do nothing.

So is the assurance that Hussein intends to use his weapons of mass destruction against us. If he did, any domestic opposition to an attack on Iraq would vanish, as it did when Afghanistan-based terrorists protected by the Taliban launched their slaughter in September. Hussein knows this.

Only if he can't do it in such a way as it can be traced back to him. Perhaps he thinks himself smarter than bin Laden, and that he'll get away with it. After all, he has so far (particularly thanks to handwringers like R.C. Longworth).

At the moment, though, the opposite is true. Little evidence exists of Hussein's links to terrorism, at least outside the Middle East. If, despite this, we attack him, we give him every incentive to unsheathe his own chemical, biological and (maybe) nuclear weapons. The first targets would be the U.S. troops invading his country.

Yes, Mr. Longworth thinks that Pentagon planners are idiots.

This line of reasoning argues that Hussein can be contained without an attack. This is not so stirring as an assault on the "axis of evil," but it avoids a cure that might be worse than the disease. And there's a precedent.

President Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire," a model for Bush's "axis of evil" speech. But once Reagan identified the evil empire, what did he do about it?

He certainly didn't launch a military attack. Instead, to his everlasting credit, he did what all his predecessors since Harry Truman had done, which was contain the Soviet Union with a policy of military, economic and diplomatic pressure. Late in his presidency, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev offered to end the Cold War, Reagan had the courage and generosity to accept that offer.

Russia is still a problem but no longer an enemy. If history repeats itself in Iraq, it will be no bad outcome.

Well, this last almost sounds reasonable, except that the analogy is flawed. The only reason we avoided war with the Soviets was that the risks were too great. Despite all of the vapors exhibited here, the potential downside of an Iraq war isn't large enough to take the risk of continued weapons development on Saddam's part.

And in his apparent isolationist zeal (yes, that's what I call him, despite his apparent channeling of Eurowhining, because he seems to think that we should never attack another country unless it is an indisputably direct and immediate threat to us), he ignores the threat to Israel. What does he think that the U.S. domestic reaction will be if Tel Aviv is nuked, because we were unwilling to preempt Saddam?

The reality, with which Mr. Longworth doesn't want to deal, is that the entire middle east is a vast swamp of tyranny and misery. Until we drain it, we will continue to be at risk of terrorist attacks. Mr. Hussein's regime is the most dangerous one there. Once it's gone, we'll have much more leverage to clean up the rest. It has to be one of the highest priorities.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:49 PM

Calling All CATS

Ahhhh...the power of Google. This cracked me up.

The Space Frontier Society (and others) have come up with the acronym CATS (Cheap Access To Space) as the goal for those of us who want to develop the High Frontier. So at their web site, they have a bulletin board called the CATS board.

Apparently some idiot has been (repeatedly) posting plaintive queries about his lost tabby.

This page has nothing to do with cats. It is about Cheap Access To Space -- "C.A.T.S." -- an acyronym. I'm sure everyone here sympathizes with you and the plight of your pets, but the people who read this board are located all across the US and abroad, not in your neighborhood. It is *HIGHLY* unlikely that any of us have seen your cats. Put a sign up at your local supermarket instead. Please.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:51 AM

Belt It Out Tom--"Wowowo, Feelings..."

I just heard Tom Ridge say on Fox that "I don't feel [emphasis editor] that pilots should have guns in the cockpits..."

Yeah, that's the problem. Too many government boobacrats, like you and Norm Mineta, are making decisions on feelings, instead of thought.

I hope the pilots strike over this.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:19 AM

Bloggers Of The World Unite

and throw off your Bravenet counters! You have nothing to lose but your page delays!

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:46 AM

Stupidest Weblog In The Universe (Current Candidate)

Here lies indisputable proof, that anyone, regardless of intelligence level or lack of a shift key, can start a weblog.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:37 AM

March 03, 2002
What Will Istanbul Think?

I see that Instapundit is still talking about Hashemite restoration.

From the Jerusalem Post article he cites:

The answer is to dismember Iraq, create an independent Kurdistan in its northern third, which could be viable with the oil reserves in that area, and give the southern two-thirds to Jordan, as payment for its readiness to incorporate the Palestinian territories. That would constitute a fulfillment of the post-World War I dream of the Hashemites - who were driven out of Hejaz by the Saudis - to rule a major kingdom from the Jordan River in the West to the border of Iran to the east.

That's all well and good, but the problem is, the Turks have their own Kurdish separatist problem, and I can't see them being willing to go along with any deal that creates an independent Kurdistan--it would be too destabilizing in eastern Turkey. There's got to be some kind of deal sweetener for them, too.

[Update on Monday morning]

An alert reader notes that my title is mistaken. The capital is, of course, not Instanbul, but Ankara.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:42 PM

Another Peaceful Religion

Hindus methodically firebombed and electrocuted an entire village of Muslims in India.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:38 PM

More Saudi Smoking Guns

There's a good article in today's Boston Globe on the Saudi connection to 911. It's the first of a three-part series. However, it does come off as apologizing for the regime, to a certain extent.

While I don't believe that what happened on September 11 was intended by the Saudis, it is a result of their misbegotten and tyrannical policies--not ours.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:59 AM

"Why Do They Hate Us" Redux

Obviously, the media (most likely as a tag team with the Daschleites who are trying to damage Bush's war popularity), has decided to float the "why do they hate us" trial balloon again.

Both Meet The Press and This Week featured the Gallup poll of the Arab countries that showed how disengaged from reality they are. At least Russert balanced Arab apologist Jim Zogby with Krauthammer, who made the key point, "we were the ones attacked--they should be asking themselves 'why do they hate us?'"

This Week double teamed the issue (no balance at all), with a reporter from Al Jazeera and some guy from the Brookings Institution, who helpfully pointed out that not only does the Arab world hate us, but the rest of the world does, too.

I have just one comment. I'll consider a Gallup poll of the Arab populace to be of greater than zero value when they perform one in an Arab country with a free press.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:43 AM

March 02, 2002
Another County Heard From

It seems that some people have nothing better to do than write weblog reviews, describing how boring my travelogues are.

Hint: John and Carl--there's this thing called a "scroll bar." It's just over there on the right side of your browser.

The people who bothered to leave comments seemed to like them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:33 PM

Shifting For Themselves

Well, well.

Right after bemoaning the difficulty of renting a car with a stick shift, I find this article in the WSJ about how they're becoming more popular again. (Link only available for subscribers)

It also has a lot of horror stories about what happens to people who don't know how to drive them:

A woman learning to drive a stick in the parking lot of the Alexandria, Va., church last August popped the clutch, jumped a curb -- and slid 85 feet into a brick pillar. The car was totaled and the church sustained $15,000 in damage -- and had to cancel its Sunday services. (The woman, whom Fairfax County Police say was not cited, could not be reached for comment.)

"We have signs up now that say 'No Practice Driving,'" says church administrator Betty Ware. "But we were thinking of adding another that says 'Especially If You're Learning on a Standard.'"

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:11 PM

Got Milk?

Charles Johnson reports that the beverages of choice for some Islamic extremists are camel's milk, and camel's... urine.

Well, if you can't tell mammary output from bladder output, maybe it's not surprising that you can't distinguish a skyscraper from a runway. Or your ass from a hole in the ground.

NBC News has learned that for the first time, U.S. Air Force F-15?s used thermobaric weapons Saturday against caves south of Gardez. Two of the extremely accurate, 2,000-pound thermobaric bombs were dropped into caves in eastern Afghanistan where al- Qaida and Taliban fighters were believed to be hiding, U.S. defense officials said.

The thermobaric warhead is designed to penetrate deeply into caves or tunnels, creating many times the normal pressure to propel the explosives further inside the cave and kill more people. The weapons contain ?fuel-rich? warheads that can fill tunnels with fireballs.

Hope they've restocked the virgin supply.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:29 PM

The Legacy Continues To Build

Not that website polls have any scientific validity, but I thought that this one at US News, on Bill Clinton's future employment prospects, was quite amusing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:24 PM

The Other NASA

Bryan Preston has some heartburn over some of my space commentary (I'm not sure exactly which, because he doesn't provide any specific links).

I guess my problem with Simberg is that he focuses exclusively on the manned space flight program, and just ignores everything else that NASA does.

That's because I don't have that much of a problem with the other things that NASA does (though I think that the aeronautics program has a lot of problems as well). What JPL does is great, for the most part, though they could do it even better if launch were lower cost and more available. Hubble is one of the many things that NASA has done that is worthwhile, even with the initial cockup.

But my point is that there is more to space than science, and 1) NASA is unwilling to recognize it, and doesn't do those non-science things very well, yet it receives exhorbitant funding for them and 2) NASA pretends that the manned space program in particular is about science, when it is certainly not--it is about jobs and national prestige.

The manned flight program is usually the most visible part of NASA, but the science mission is arguably the most important-- that's where most of the real ground-breaking research is taking place. And with programs like Hubble that require in-orbit servicing, you can't have one without the other at this stage. NASA will evolve into whatever the American taxpayer wants and needs it to be, but calling it "socialistic" and calling for its defunding is just hyperbole without thoughtfulness.

When I (accurately) call NASA that, I am primarily talking about the manned spaceflight portion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:47 PM

Trouble At The Mill

And for those interested in my PQ (Philosophy Quotient) here are my results from this test.

1. Mill (100%)
2. Rand (91%)
3. Kant (79%)
4. Aristotle (76%)
5. Aquinas (72%)
6. Stoics (72%)
7. Epicureans (66%)
8. Bentham (64%)
9. Sartre (57%)
10. Hume (52%)
11. Prescriptivism (52%)
12. Plato (51%)
13. Spinoza (47%)
14. Nietzsche (42%)
15. Augustine (39%)
16. Hobbes (39%)
17. Cynics (26%)
18. Ockham (20%)
19. Noddings (13%)

I haven't had the time to figure out what this means.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:25 AM

Now This Is Disturbing

Just to match myself up against my weglogging compatriots, I took the religion test that everyone else has been taking. Here's how I came out:

1. Nontheist (100%)
2. Secular Humanism (100%)
3. Unitarian Universalism (92%)
4. Theravada Buddhism (75%)
5. Liberal Quakers (69%)
6. Neo-Pagan (65%)
7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (58%)
8. Taoism (42%)
9. New Thought (42%)
10. Scientology (42%)
11. New Age (41%)
12. Bahá'í Faith (38%)
13. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (38%)
14. Eastern Orthodox (38%)
15. Islam (38%)
16.Orthodox Judaism (38%)
17. Reform Judaism (38%)
18. Roman Catholic (38%)
19. Mahayana Buddhism (37%)
20. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (36%)
21. Sikhism (34%)
22. Hinduism (30%)
23. Jainism (30%)
24. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (27%)
25. Orthodox Quaker (27%)
26. Seventh Day Adventist (21%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (19%)

I'm disturbed because I feel very little political affinity for "secular humanists" and Unitarians. Most of the ones that I know are flaming liberals (in the modern, hijacked sense of the word--i.e., socialists).

Some of the questions were a little misleading. The one on abortion asked whether I thought that it was immoral (I do) but it didn't discuss whether or not it should be illegal (I think that it should be a state, not federal issue, i.e., I think that Roe v Wade was a flawed decision, regardless of my position on abortion).

Similarly, it asked if homosexuality is immoral (no, not in my opinion). I think that there may have been an implication that immoral things should also be illegal, but it wasn't clear.

Anyway, if nothing else, it shows that it's possible to have a "left-wing" religious profile, and still think that Bill Clinton is a sociopathic and corrupt dissembler. Of course, Christopher Hitchens has already proven that...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:35 AM

Now, That's A Good Reason

In a story about Janet Reno's campaign in the Florida panhandle, I found this little gem.

Many in the audience were snowbirds, Democrats from places like Wausau, Wis., visiting the heavily Republican Emerald Coast.

"I was born a Democrat and my dad was born a Democrat. I gotta stay Democrat," said Wausau's own Irv Fletcher. Fletcher and his group arrived early at Angler's Beachside Café, which opens out on the pier. They found outside seating to watch Reno's walk down the beach.

"Gotta stay a Democrat" 'cuz your dad was one, eh?

Reminds me of the old joke:

"My greatgranddaddy was a Democrat, my granddaddy was a Democrat, and my daddy was a Democrat. But I'm a Republican."

"How's that?"

"I learned to read."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:22 AM

March 01, 2002
Our Friends The Saudis?

Somehow, Saudi Arabia was left off the most recent list of allies in our war on terrorism. Is this to send them a message, or is it a final recognition of the reality--that they're not only not our allies, they're the enemy?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:03 PM

Dying RINO

I mentioned previously that Riordan was not a lock for the Republican nomination. Partly because the "he's the only Republican who can beat Davis" argument falls kind of flat when Bill Simon is leading Davis by two points in the Field Poll. When an incumbent is behind to a total political unknown, it's pretty bad news for him.

My money was previously already on Simon for the nomination. With Simon's surge, particularly against Davis, the only reason that real Republicans might have had to vote for Riordan has evaporated.

Now I think Simon's got a shot at following in Reagan's footsteps and beating an incumbent Democratic governor as well. And what a breath of fresh air he'd be--a non-politician.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:39 PM

Another Potential Nuclear Waste Site

Reader Mike Stein, another Nevadan, suggests:

How about Afganistan? It is about as inhabitable as the Moon and somewhat closer. Wasn't there a cave complex that withstood continuous bombing by our best conventional arsenal? Just a thought.

Well, if we can pay them to not grow poppies, why not this? (BTW, I wonder how much I can get paid to not grow poppies? Or corn? I can not grow stuff with the best of them...)

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:57 AM

More Nevada Political Commentary

There was a useful political comment from reader John Stotz, of Fallon, NV:

I am frankly a little disappointed in Nevada's congressional delegation with regards to this issue, although I can understand their position when one considers the historical record. The historical record would reveal that generations of these people living near or downwind from above-ground nuclear testing in the 50's have suffered severe, life-shortening health problems. There is certainly a legacy of distrust to overcome.

That being said, we have come a long way since above-ground testing. I honestly believe the approach should be based on the idea that Nevada can be the repository, Nevada can become the Nation's experts in meeting this need, and oh by the way, here is what it will cost you America: completely subsidized education or energy, or a medical plan or what have you, for the citizens of Nevada).

The fact of the matter is that the project will probably happen no matter what Sen Reid does. It will no doubt happen in a crawl/walk/run fashion in order to mitigate hazards and reduce liabilities over many years, based on "sound science", and it will no doubt improve as technology improves. My point is, it could happen with the support of the Nevada congressional delegation, with an eye to being in it from the ground floor to ensure every possible safeguard and mitigation is in place, deriving every possible benefit from it for the people they represent, while meeting one of the nation's critical needs. Or it could proceed as it is now, with our leadership emotionally casting Nevada and its environment in the role of potential "victim", and when the project comes to pass, then having to negotiate any derived benefits from a position of weakness in the form of "reparations". With the advent and rapid development of Indian gaming, this state desperately needs to diversify and this is a huge opportunity if emotion can be laid to rest and our leadership willing to meet the challenge of doing it right.

He could be right. But I'm still hoping that this, combined with several other ongoing events, could encourage some new thinking about space transport.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:52 AM

Fox News Response

I received a plethora of email from the Fox News piece on nuclear waste disposal. I'm going to put up a little FAQ here that responds to the majority of it. Then I'll let the fray take place in the comments section.

Why is this even an issue? Isn't Yucca Mountain is a reasonable and safe way to store it?

Yes, but people aren't rational. We might be able to take advantage of their irrationality to develop space.

Which leads to the other popular and reasonable question:

The watermelon environmentalists went nuts over a little plutonium on Galileo and Cassini. Why do you think they'd let us get away with something like this?

Well, the question is not whether or not they'll oppose it, but whether or not their opposition will be effective. I'm cautiously optimistic because 1) their credibility as of recent years has been on the wane, 2) people are less likely to put of with such anti-tech nonsense post 911, and 3) there will be a newfound sense that anything we can do to utilize new energy sources that free us from Middle East oil is worth doing.

That is not to say that they can't stop it--just that there is cause for hope.

This next one was a popular one. Please don't send me any more, even though each mention of it was hilarious, and had me falling out of my chair with helpless laughter. Anyone who does will be hunted down and killed, painfully:

Remember that show from the '70s, Space: 1999? And Martin Landau and the bell-bottom uniforms?

Yes.

I'd almost forgotten it.

Now I have to do so again.

Thanks a lot.

Are you trying to destroy the nuclear industry by making it too expensive?

Well, actually, the NRC's been doing a pretty good job of that for decades, without any assistance from me. Every method proposed to deal with nuclear waste is ridiculously expensive, including Yucca Mountain. I've simply selected an expensive means that also provides a useful spinoff--cheap and reliable space access.

Wouldn't it make the Moon harder to colonize, with all that radioactive waste up there?

Any technology that can handle lunar colonization will consider nuclear waste to be way down the list of environmental problems, after total vacuum, thermal extremes, dust, lack of water and essential nutrients, and the occasional solar flare. This is not to say that lunar colonization will be impossible, or even difficult--just that nuclear waste will not present much of a difficulty relative to the natural ones.

Why would it be more expensive to just drop it into the Sun?

To understand this requires a little basic orbital mechanics.

An object in orbit has a certain velocity needed to keep it from falling toward the thing that it's orbiting around. In order for it to fall, it has to be slowed down.

For an object going around the sun (like the earth, and anything on it) that velocity is the distance traveled divided by time, or about 600 million miles per year, or about 70,000 miles an hour. That's roughly how much an object on earth must be slowed down in order for it to fall into the sun.

To get to the Moon, on the other hand, is more like 25,000 miles per hour. Quite a bit easier (particularly when one considers that the propellant required is an exponential function of the velocity change--a factor of three difference in velocity means a factor of 2.7^3 or 20 times as much propellant...)

Waste isn't a problem if you use breeders. Didn't you know that, dummy?

Well, actually, I did. I was ignoring breeders for the purpose of that article. When I said it's a problem independent of design, I was referring to non-breeder design. I think that breeders are a tough sell, politically, for a number of reasons.

I've seen pictures of the Shuttle blowing up, over and over and over and over and over. How can we ever build a launch system that won't blow up and scatter waste all over the place, killing us all?

Well, OK, no one asked it quite like that, but you know that's what lots of people are going to think, and people are legitimately concerned about reliability and safety. There's an answer, but I don't have time to post it right now (kind of like Fermat's Last Theorem). I'll get to it a little later today, but I've got other stuff to do right now, and I want to at least post what I've done so far.

[Update: 1:56 PM PST]

OK, here's the story.

There are two ways to deal with this:

1) Make the vehicle extremely reliable so it almost never has a catastrophic failure.
2) Package the payload such that if such a failure occurs, no radioactive material can be released.

Both of these are technically and economically achievable. As I said in the column, do not look to any existing launch vehicle as in any way representative of what is achievable in either cost or reliability for space transports.

Expendables are very expensive because we throw the hardware away every time. They're unreliable because every flight is their first--they suffer from the "infant mortality" phenomenon.

Shuttle is expensive because it's partly expendable, and because it wasn't designed for a high flight rate, and it's not flown at a high flight rate, so there are no economies of scale.

A new, fully-reusable space transport, flown at the high flight rates required would suffer from neither of these problems. In fact, I would expect to see several hundred consecutive successful flights of such a system before we would commit to using it for such a program.

As to the second means, payload canisters can be designed that will survive any conceivable launch accident, or reentry from orbit, without releasing any of the waste. This adds weight, and hence cost, but not so much as to necessarily make it unaffordable. Again, this can be demonstrated, using an inert payload.

And finally of course, the perennial question, probably from a Fox Network (not Fox News) viewer:

DID WE REALLY GO TO THE MOON?

Obviously, the questioner somehow feels that the question has more urgency, and less kookiness, if it's asked with the shift key locked...

Answer: No. "WE" didn't. But several American astronauts did. No further comment.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:18 AM