We're driving to St. Louis, and then flying back to Florida. Have a happy new year, all, if I don't check in sooner.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:09 AMBoy monkeys like toy cars, and girl monkeys like dolls.
So much for the blank slate.
And though I have no time to crack wise on this subject, I give you the Freepers:
Nancy Hopkins is hunched over the toilet as we speak. Could someone out there please be a dear, and hold her hair for her?Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:21 PM
Jim Oberg points out in email that AP has a misleading statement in this story about the European Galileo positioning system:
The $4 billion Galileo project will eventually use about 30 satellites and is expected to more than double GPS coverage, providing satellite navigation for everyone from motorists to sailors to mapmakers. Because Galileo is under civilian control, the ESA also says it can guarantee operation at almost all times, unlike the American system.Last year, President Bush ordered plans for temporarily disabling GPS satellites during national crises to prevent terrorists from using the navigational technology.
The juxtaposition of these two statements implies that it's the Bush administration's actions that have caused Europe to embark on this boondoggle. This is nutty, of course, because the program has been in planning for years, and could hardly be a response to something that the administration did a year ago--it's almost a non-sequitur. In fact, as Jim points out, it was actually caused by the Clinton administration's actions in not just planning to, but actually shutting down the system during the Balkans wars. But they can't bring themselves to mention that, of course.
Jim notes:
Maybe it's just me, but such omissions and slants in general AP stories have gotten more and more noticeable.
It's not just you, Jim.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Oh, and speaking of double standards, Michael Scheuer has admitted that Al Qaeda renditions began under the Clinton administration. But of course, it only made us into a police state when a Republican president is in office, and we're at war.
I'd take a lot of these critics and fair-weather civil libertarians more seriously if I'd heard from them in the nineties, when Janet Reno was attacking churches with tanks, and snatching kids at gunpoint, the administration was collecting FBI files and leaking data against its political enemies, trumping up charges against innocent people so they could replace them with cronies, destroying evidence of wrongdoing in emails, threatening and libeling inconvenient women, etc.
You know, when we weren't at war? Well, other than at war against the evil right wingers...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:43 PMCharles Fried makes it:
The president claims that congressional authorization for military action against Al Qaeda, together with his inherent constitutional powers, make such action lawful. There is some plausibility to that claim but until tested in the courts it is impossible to give a definitive opinion about it......it is likely that at the first, broadest stages of the scan no human being is involved -- only computers. Finally, it is also possible that the disclosure of any details about the search and scan strategies and the algorithms used to sift through them would immediately allow countermeasures by our enemies to evade or defeat them.
If such impersonal surveillance on the orders of the president for genuine national security purposes without court or other explicit authorization does violate some constitutional norm, then we are faced with a genuine dilemma and not an occasion for finger-pointing and political posturing.
If the situation is as I hypothesize and leads to important information that saves lives and property, would any reasonable citizen want it stopped? But if it violates the Constitution can we accept the proposition that such violations must be tolerated?
RTWT
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:35 PMThe ACLU is defending the "whistleblowers." What a shock.
Where were they when administration officials were blowing the whistle on Joe Wilson's lies, and being investigated for it?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:48 PMAs part of the continuing saga, Gaza is "dissolving into anarchy":
Television scenes reminiscent of those from Beirut’s civil war period showed vanloads of rifle-waving, masked men racing through Rafiah’s streets, while PA police threw up roadblocks and rummaged through taxis and car trunks apparently in search of the hostages.Hamas and Fatah terrorist leaders appealed over radio and television for those holding the Burtons to release them. Groups holding signs demonstrated in support of Kate Burton and pleaded with her kidnappers to let her go.
No group has claimed responsibility for this abduction which differs from those that occurred before in that no demands have been made for the Burtons’ release.
The meltdown of what law and order did exist as long as Israel administered Gaza is seen by many regional watchers as a harbinger of what will happen in the “West Bank” when Israel deserts that territory too.
Unfortunately, that sounds right to me.
[Update at 1 PM Central]
Here's more:
After the compound was stormed, the EU's observers stationed at the crossing quickly fled the scene in panic while the gunmen prevented vehicles from reaching the crossing. The observers are responsible for monitoring the crossing and enforcing the agreement between Israel and the PA on live camera transmissions of border activity.The armed men refused to heed demands by PA officials to leave the compound, and the EU workers left out of fear for their lives. "Our monitors are now in the Kerem Shalom military base [in Israel]. When the situation is clear, and these people leave, we will go back to our work," said EU spokesman Julio De La Guardia. He said the PA police advised the observers to leave the crossing.
They bravely ran away. And you mean they fled to that "shi**y little country Israel"?
Do tell.
Why didn't they go to that well-known bastion of democracy, freedom and security, Egypt?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:56 AMDebbie Schlussel writes about the politically correct program directors at XM satellite radio.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:40 AMSteven Milloy has the top ten junk science claims of the year. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Whelan has her own list on health reporting:
Kevin Trudeau's book on Natural Cures which argues that "medical science has absolutely, 100 percent failed in the curing and prevention of disease," and says that tap water can kill you and that organic food is our only hope — is one of 2005's best-selling advice books.
As long as our public educational system remains an overfunded, bureaucratized, managed-by-education-majors disaster, there will be a ready market for pseudoscientific nonsense.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:29 AMI guess we'll go back to Boca tomorrow and put up the shutters. So, will this be a 2005, or 2006 storm? It's not in either's hurricane season. I guess they must consider it 2005, since they named it Zeta, rather than Alberto, the "A" storm for next year.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:03 AMWell, the Justice Department is apparently looking into the leaks:
"We are opening an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified materials related to the NSA," one official said.
I'm sure that the media will be cheering on the prosecutor to find the culprit(s), who care so little about our national security, just as they did in the notorious "outing" of "covert CIA agent" Valerie Plame.
Right? Right?
I wonder if they have any suspects? I'm thinking maybe someone over on the north side of the Hill. Last name Rockefeller? Or Hagel?
I hope we'll see how long some other NYT and WaPo reporters/editors are willing to sit in the hoosegow to protect their sources.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:47 AMFAA-AST has (as expected for the past few months) issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) on public space passenger travel. This is the next step in the process by which the useful enabling legislation passed by Congress a year ago gets translated into actual regulations. The public has sixty days to provide input to it, and as a potential spaceline operator, I'll have to sit down and read the 123-page document when I get a chance and comment on it, to both them and my readers.
Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen in the next week or so. Jesse Londin, over at Space Law Probe, has similar immediate constraints, but I expect some useful commentary from that quarter over the next few weeks, and will link to it when it happens.
[Update at 11 AM Central]
Jeff Foust (who has some other interesting space policy items) points out an AP article on it. While I obviously have to read the NPRM itself, just glancing through the article and looking at the reporter's summary of it, all the rules seem reasonable to me, and consonant with the intent of the legislation (though I remain concerned now, as I did then, that the time period before FAA can regulate safety more stringently remains too short). But in any event, the devil, as always, dwells in the details.
[Another update at noon Central]
Liz at Regolith has a summary of the proposed regs.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:02 AMFor those interested in American history (and interesting parallels between the nineteenth-century frontier and our current projects in the Middle East), here's a very interesting book review, of an old and obscure book, over at Albion's Seedlings.
[Update on Friday morning]
Sorry, link was wrong, but it's fixed now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:35 PMI should note, for those who are still arguing about whether or not the president broke the law when he intercepted enemy communications, they should go read that notorious neocon (note: I'm being sarcastic) Cass Sunstein's take on it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:28 PMSave yourself the trip over to DU or Kos. Argue with your own automated holiday moonbat.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:18 AMSixty five percent of Palestinians support attacks on America and Europe:
According to PMW, prayers to annihilate all “infidels” have been included in Friday prayers on PA TV at least six times in recent months. Two such sermons were delivered by Yusuf Jum'a Salamah, PA Minister of the Waqf Religious Authority - the most important religious office in the PA. Even though PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas was present on at least one of these occasions, similar prayers for genocide continued on the PA-owned and controlled TV in subsequent weeks.
And we foolishly continue to fund them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:56 AMAl Qaeda is establishing a base in Gaza.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AMThere remains a lot of bad blood between the Wolverines and Cornhuskers, after many felt that Michigan should have had a sole national title in 1997, after Nebraska's "soccer play" in the end zone that should have cost them the game against Missouri, and a sense that the co-championship was a retirement gift to their coach.
Well, tonight, the issue as to who's the best will definitely be resolved, at least this year, though of course it will tell us nothing about what would have happened in a matchup between the 1997 teams.
[Update after the game]
Geez...
Did they just beat the record for the number of laterals in a single play? As my (semi(?)-lapsed Catholic) sister-in-law said, "That wasn't just a Hail Mary--it was the whole damn rosary."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:54 PMThe next time someone tells you it's a bad idea to allow firearms in an aircraft, because firing a bullet through the fuselage will bring it down (one of the many bogus arguments against allowing flight crew to be armed), point this out.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:43 PMI'm working here with almost-new stuff. We have a Linksys BEFW11S2 V.2 wireless router about six months old, and an HP-Compaq Presario SR1563CL computer, about the same vintage. The wireless seemed to work all right before the computer, when I and others used it for our laptops. But now, with the computer, the connection occasionally (and by occasionally I mean within an hour of non-use) dies. The wireless software widget on the computer claims to see a strong signal, but it cannot connect using the software. The only way to get it working again is to both reset the router, and to hit a hardware "Connect" button on the computer keyboard, that does I have no idea what, except that when we go through these rituals, the connection comes back up (though the wireless widget may continue to say that it can't make a connection).
Is anyone familiar with either or both of these de-vices, and able to divine what the heck is going on? It's obviously majorly irritating.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:25 PMA couple friends were visiting on Christmas day, and asked me what I thought of the French riots, now that they were over and we had a little perspective. I replied that I wasn't at all sure that they were over, just that they weren't being reported much any more. Turns out I was right, if this report is correct.
It's simply become part of the media background now, and is no longer news, any more than gang murders in the inner cities. In fact, if there weren't such a need to continue to make Iraq look like an irremediable, unmitigated ongoing disaster for a hated Republican administration, the occasional terrorist bombings there wouldn't (and shouldn't) any longer be news either.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:36 AMProfessor Reynolds has some thoughts, with which I obviously agree:
Space enthusiasts, God knows, have seen plenty of disappointment in the past few decades, as the brief false dawn of Apollo led to years of failed promises and no visible momentum. But we're now seeing signs of new technologies -- and, just as important, new systems of organization -- that make a takeoff into sustained growth much more likely for the space sector. Prizes to develop technology, space tourism to develop markets and help us move up the learning curve, and people with the money and vision to provide the seed capital for both: The essentials now look to be in place. It's about time.
And other than the potential prizes, much of what NASA is doing seems increasingly irrelevant.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:57 AMThere's a little discussion over at the Motley Fool web site about Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos (registration required). I thought that this little bit raised more questions than it answered:
...entrepreneurs such as Bezos, Branson, and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) co-founder Paul Allen -- who funded the winning SpaceShipOne in the X-Prize competition -- appear ready to provide the capital. That's good news for dozens of companies, from Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) and Ball Aerospace (NYSE: BLL) to Orbital Sciences (NYSE: ORB) and SpaceDev. They're all likely to have a hand in our latest quest for the heavens.
Well, as the old test question goes, one of these things is not like the other three. Why Lockmart, Ball and Orbital? Why not Boeing? Or Northrop-Grumman?
How does the success of low-cost entrants benefit the stock of people operating at high costs, under the old paradigms? Maybe it does, but they certainly don't explain it. Simply saying that "they're all likely to have a hand" hardly makes for a useful (or credible) explanation. This kind of thing makes me question the wisdom of any of their other stock advice.
[Via Clark Lindsey]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:45 AMConsider the fact that more than 100 people have already plunked down $200,000 apiece for a seat on a Virgin Galactic spaceflight and thousands more have already placed a total of $11 million in deposits for a chance at manned spaceflight."Intergalactic Space Virgins", Dominic Basulto, Tech Central Station
I traced the $11 million number to a Tai quote in space.com "We’ve taken over $10 million in deposits and we’ve not really started to advertise".
Note that $10 million corresponds to 50 people having paid $200,000 in full or 500 paying the minimum deposit of $20,000, not "100 people paid in full" or "thousands more" placing $20,000.
I am ambivalent about using funny numbers to start a bandwagon on the full priced seats. Somebody please keep me honest on the game prize seat reporting.
$10-$11 million is the lowest number reported for some time. Most everyone else has an implicit $780 million in deposits.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 04:54 AMThe latest, year-end Carnival of Tomorrow is up, and has a number of very interesting links (of which mine is undoubtedly the least interesting). Hard to believe that we're already almost four years into the new century, and millennium, and while we don't yet have flying cars, in many other ways, we're living in the science-fiction future of our childhoods, at least for those baby boomers among us.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:46 PMHere's a good Internet equivalent of a "man-(and woman)-in-the-street interview"--a compendium of Freeper responses to the article in the Toledo Blade about Ray Kurzweil and life extension.
The interesting thing to me will be the responses when (as one commenter put it) "a mouse lives ten years."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:36 PMI'm here, but don't have much time to blog, between getting truculent wireless connections working, family visiting, and working on a proposal with deadlines next week and telecons every day. I do want to note that there's been a lot of discussion in this post on NSA "spying," and while I don't agree with commenter Jane Bernstein, I'm gratified to see that the level of discussion is informed, rational, and civil. May all my comments sections be that way.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:22 PMWe're heading off to Missouri to visit Patricia's family for a few days. I'll probably check in from there, but not until tomorrow, if then. We'll be back on Saturday, so I'll save my New Years' wishes for my return.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:48 PM...from Mark Levin, for all those Democrats and journalists (and both) who are hypocritically hyperventilating about presidential power and eavesdropping.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:18 PMI'm getting spammed by poker sites from Blogspot, so I'm going to shut down all blogspot URLs in comments until further notice.
Get a real URL, folks. They don't cost that much.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:06 AMI know you'll be shocked to hear this, but the UN has been wasting tsunami relief funds.
Glenn has more.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:29 AMThis seems like good news:
...some Iraqis are warming to a stronger relationship with Israel, in part because they are frightened of Iran's influence."They are afraid of Iran's extremist political system. If Iran were a democracy, they wouldn't be afraid," Alusi said. "We don't have border problems with Israel. We don't have historical problems with Israel," just Iran.
At last a glimmer of common sense on the issue. Of course, it's important to not let this grow into a civil war, with Israel and the Sunni Iraqis on one side, and the Shia and Iranians on the other.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:24 AMI haven't said much about the NSA spying "scandal," or the whining about monitoring mosques for radiation, but Jay Manifold has useful posts on both. As he points out, much of the discussion in the press on both these subjects (related mostly by the fact that they're both largely symptoms of Bush Derangement Syndrome) has been appallingly illiterate and innumerate, from a technical standpoint.
On the mosque thing, I'm having trouble working up much sympathy here. I suppose that the complaint is the usual one--that we're "discriminating" and "profiling" by not looking for evidence of nuclear materials in churches, synagogues and covens. This is a charge to which I heartily plead guilty.
The word "discrimination" has gotten a bad rap, but in fact, people who don't or won't discriminate, won't last long in this world. Of course, irrational discrimination is a bad thing, but when we have limited investigatory resources, and there's a long history (and recent and current one, in Iraq and Israel and the territories) of mosques being used as weapons depots, it makes all the sense in the world to keep a close eye on them. When it comes to nuclear materials, it's pretty hard to justify a "right to privacy."
[Update at noon eastern]
Michael Barone has some common sense (something that seems to be in short supply in the MSM and, as he points out, the New York Times) on the wiretap issue:
Let's put the issue very simply. The president has the power as commander in chief under the Constitution to intercept and monitor the communications of America's enemies. Indeed, it would be a very weird interpretation of the Constitution to say that the commander in chief could order U.S. forces to kill America's enemies but not to wiretap -- or, more likely these days, electronically intercept -- their communications. Presidents have asserted and exercised this power repeatedly and consistently over the last quarter-century.Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:18 AM
Clark Lindsey notes an encouraging trend in discussion about space:
...both Bezos and Musk (in other articles) cite the long term goal of space settlement as one of the primary motivations for their projects. In the past year I've seen a rise in the visibility and credibility of space settlement as a motivation for human spaceflight rather than simply exploration and science.
About time.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:45 PM...all my Christian readers, that is. The rest of you can go suck eggs. Or enjoy the holiday anyway, as I will. And my very best wishes are reserved for those in "the sandbox," trying to help make a better Middle East, at the potential cost of their lives and limbs, and at the definite cost of a holiday at home with their families.
And to all a good night.
[Note: this message will be on top for a while, so don't let that stop you from scrolling down to look for any potential new content. On the other hand, there probably won't be a lot under the circumstances...]
[Update a few minutes later]
All right, happy Channukah to my Jewish readers as well, though we all know that it's a pretty minor holiday as Jewish holidays go, and none of us goyim would pay any attention at all if it hadn't been set up as an alternative to Christmas so the Jewish kids wouldn't feel left out.
And as for Kwanza...please. Well, OK. If I have any readers who actually celebrate it, have a good one.
And to heck with you Festivus people. Get a non-nihilistic religion.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:24 PMNo, Thomas, your experience is not atypical, at least going by me. I've never, ever received a rebate.
I no longer take them seriously, or even bother to send them in. If it worked once in a while, I might bother, but it's gotten to the point that it's not worth the time and hassle on an expected-value basis, even when it's fifty bucks or so. If the price is worth it without the rebate, I buy it, if not, then I don't. But I never factor in the rebate any more in the purchase decision, unless it's instant in the store. I wish that they'd stop this fraud.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:24 PMLileks has a depressing Christmas radio newscast from sixty-one years ago. The cause was clearly hopeless. Why didn't we just give up?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:17 PMThey've sequenced the genome of a woolly mammoth. I think we're going to see one walking around in a few years.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:03 AMThings are progressing nicely:
"We have demonstrated the controlled synthesis of nanostructures at levels of complexity significantly beyond any work yet reported. What we have done is the most challenging synthetic problem in these structures, and one with huge potential payoffs from both the standpoint of fundamental scientific impact and producing novel de-vices and applications."Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:27 AM
Alan Boyle has a useful wrapup. It would have been hard to top 2004 for an exciting year for private space, but things are moving slowly but steadily toward the day that we open up the frontier, with or without government help.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:47 AMAny HD geeks out there?
I'm looking at this television, which is on sale at Costco for less than a grand.
It looks good, but I found this one review that's giving me a little heartburn, because we have DirecTV, and planned to upgrade to a triple LNB dish and new HD TIVO receiver.
It is an excellent set for HD OTA and regular definition satellite receiver. But I recently upgraded to an HD receiver for DirecTV and found out it doesn't have the capability to keep up with the HD satellite receiver. There is a phenomena called macroblocking that occurs since the digital picture cannot be translated properly. Defined - it is an awful picture on the 480i channels, which means about 95 of my programs looked awful.
I searched all over the web, and couldn't find any other reference to this problem. Is it a real one, or is this an isolated problem for this one reviewer, either because (s)he didn't understand how to set it up, or there was something defective about that unit?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:41 PMIf this is true, Syria has made her bet, and is going to stand or fall with Iran.
Is there any reason that we shouldn't simply declare war on both of them? We don't necessarily have to do anything about it immediately, but it would certainly bring diplomacy in synch with reality, and open up a lot more options in dealing with them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:57 PMMaybe last year? All I know is that, historically, it's unusual for Congress to pass a NASA authorization bill. Usually the thing dies, in committee or because it never makes it through conference, and NASA ends up just working off the appropriation. Traditionally, there has never been much pressure to pass one, because it's largely viewed as symbolic anyway, and the appropriations bill (which actually funds the programs) is the only one that really counts. But with the new authorization for larger prizes, it's a great symbol this year.
[Via Space Politics]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:25 PMI won the Space Show's first ever message to space competition. There are six this year. The rules of the contest allow a one-page message that takes no more than five minutes to read. My winning message in full:
We taste terrible.
Hear me say it for the aliens here.
A robot that is self aware. Is it too early to form PETR (People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots)?
I'll personally be interested to see if it starts touching itself improperly.
Seriously, I've done this experiment myself with both of my cats. They clearly recognize themselves in the mirror, because they don't get upset (as they generally would) at the sight of another cat.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:45 AMMiranda Devine says that many of the problems in Sydney are a result of years of lax law enforcement against the Lebanese Muslim gangs. I disagree with this, though:
Rather than a problem of race, religion or multiculturalism, Sydney is suffering from a longstanding crime problem. It is a textbook case of how soft policing and lenient magistrates embolden successive waves of criminals, infecting other people who might otherwise have been law-abiding.
But that begs the question of why the policing was soft, and the magistrates lenient. Ultimately, I think it still comes back to a misplaced multiculturalism, and an unwillingness to crack down on religious minorities, even when they were breeding a culture of intolerance and criminality.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AMOut Of The Cradle notes a new program to look for errant objects:
When fully operational, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) project will deeply scan most of the night sky several times a month. About three-quarters of the sky are visible from the Hawaiian Islands, and Pan-STARRS will use four linked telescopes connected to its enormous cameras to take broad pictures of unprecedented detail. Objects as dim as 24th magnitude—250 times fainter than objects detected by the current champ in asteroid spotting LINEAR—will pop out of the background and be analyzed for their threat potential.
Now, if we can just get some funding for some creative thinking about what to do about them when we find them (and stop listening to the people at Livermore who've never seen a problem that can't be solved with a nuke). Particularly ideas that allow us to utilize them, as well as avoid them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:46 AMThe most popular dog and cat names from 2005.
What happened to the old perennials "Rover" and "Fido"?
And "Max"? For dogs and cats both?
What's that all about?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:21 PMThere's quite a bit of discussion in Sam's post, some of which expresses appropriate concern about how long we have to put up with a modest (and sorry, that's all it is, despite all the nonsense about living in a police state under Bushitler) suspension of some of the civil liberties that many of us had taken for granted, given that we don't have a declared war, and that it's not clear when it will be over. Tigerhawk has an excellent essay on that subject.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:27 PMA moose was attracted to the plaintive sounds of a teenager's saxophone.
At least that's what the story says. Question to the copy editor who wrote the headline, though--who taught the moose's son to play the sax? It reminds me of the old joke that Groucho told about shooting an elephant in his pajamas.
Here's a contest, for the best guess at what the song was. Somehow I doubt if it was "Embraceable You..."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:45 PMI know that this will want you to dig deep, and make a contribution to their plight in this Christmholiday season.
It's getting so that journalists can no longer afford to live in New York. Maybe they should drive a bus instead. Given the quality of much of their output, many of them are sure overpaid for what they're doing now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:03 AMRobert Reich in today's Marketplace Morning Report ("Spies Like Us") talks about how unchecked executive power is a concern for business. We can argue about whether Congress authorized any means necessary with its vaguely worded declaration of war. We can argue about whether the ends justify the means. But if the President can designate anyone an enemy combatant with no judicial check, that suspends habeus corpus. Holding people without charge is not supposed to happen in America especially not to American citizens on American soil.
If the President can tap anyone's US-overseas calls without judicial review and use the evidence against them, that suspends the 4th amendment protections on unreasonable searches.
If the President can search my library book record, that nullifies the first amendment right to freedom of the press as surely as staking out people's bedrooms nullifies their right to privacy.
Innocent until proven guilty is being whittled away as people like Walt Anderson are being held without bail based on their reading list.
Reading unclassified information is not illegal. A free press requires that anything that is legally published should be read without legal consequence.
I believe that authorities have overstepped here. There are antibodies society should create to check an executive or Congressional majority tinkering with the Constitution.
I propose that libraries be reorganized to hide reading lists from authorities. In particular, books should be checked out anonymously. The main business problem this causes is that the library doesn't know who to send an overdue notice to. To solve this problem, readers should be allowed to pay a substantial deposit in cash to check out a book anonymously which would then be returned when the book is returned.
Let the Executive Branch go to Congress for money and get a warrant for staking out the library if it is so all-fired important to find out what we are reading.
So check the Executive. Check the wire. Check out the books without Big Brother looking over your shoulder.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:21 AMI doubt if this is true, but if there's anyone on earth who deserves to be beaten in detention, it's surely Saddam Hussein.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:09 AMPosting will likely be light this week, and next, due to deadlines and holiday activities.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:21 AMNASA can now authorize up to ten million dollars for a prize without consulting Congress. The previous limit was a quarter of a million.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:02 AMAs his first Christmas behind bars approaches, serial space entrepreneur Walt Anderson is looking like a political prisoner. Michael Mealing has a Christmas card for him.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:41 AMI build my own machines, and having had to deal with upgrading Dells from friends and relatives (and my work laptop as well, since that what the company that I'm working with insists on buying) would never, ever consider buying one.
But now Jane Galt, who has heretofore sung their praises, has finally learned her lesson as well. Not a pretty Christmas story (though I have to confess that my sympathy is not abundant, given my previous attitude toward Dell).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:09 AMIt's apparently not a structural design flaw, as I had feared yesterday.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:29 AMFrom Ann Althouse, who makes an interesting point about the real victims of the insistence of society that men be heterosexual:
I've made fun of the Oscar ads for the movie, because of the way they emphasize the relationship between the men and their wives. This ad campaign is laughable for intentionally hiding the nature of the central love story. Nevertheless, the story of the wives interests me greatly. And the political argument inherent in this part of the story is, I think, especially strong. Those who would try to prevent or inhibit men from forming lifetime bonds with each other ought to give more thought to what happens to the women they marry. Those who think a man should struggle against his sexual orientation and find a way to form the classic marriage relationship with a woman ought to think about what they are advocating for the woman: a lifetime relationship with a man who has only feigned sexual attraction to her.
Lots of good discussion as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:10 PMPeople (unconvincingly, to me, and probably to anyone who's not suffering selective amnesia about the runup to the war) accuse George W. Bush of shifting justifications after 911, but how about shifting justification for 911?
...bin Laden's justifications for 9/11 are continually moulded and shaped by Western media coverage. At first - on 28 September 2001 - he disavows responsibility for the attacks, instead trying to pin the blame on some dastardly conspiracy within America itself: 'The United States should trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself….persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilisation, nation, country or ideology could survive…. Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem [with] the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy…. Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United States? That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks.'
The denial of the left that they are in the tank for America's enemies, regardless of how much they are in opposition to traditional "liberal" or "progressive" goals, is growing (has grown?) completely indefensible.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:14 PMI heard on the radio that when the plane went down off Miami Beach this afternoon, a flotilla of private boats were on it almost immediately to try to find survivors. It's similar to what happened in 911, when a large number of people spontaneously evacuated lower Manhattan across the rivers to New Jersey and Brooklyn.
Unfortunately, this time, even as rapid as the response was, it looks like the people were beyond saving.
[Update at 7:30 PM EST]
Here's a link from a local blogger.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:35 PMHopefully, until the beginning of a new era of lower-cost spaceflight.
[Update just before scheduled launch]
On a fifteen-minute hold for winds. It looks like Clark Lindsey is on the telecon.
I would assume that the count clock will remain stopped at fifteen minutes until the winds die down. They have about an eight-hour launch window.
[Update at 2:27 EST]
Kwaj Rockets says that the mission is aborted (I assume that means for today), but no one else has confirmed that yet.
[Update a minute or two later]
Clark Lindsey confirms. And it's not just weather:
A structural problem has been found in the first stage and will require repair. So launch is scrubbed till next year. RATS!!
Rats, indeed. Better safe than sorry, though.
How is it that they discover a structural problem with the first stage only fifteen minutes prior to launch?
[Update at 4:20 EST]
Here's a report from Alan Boyle.
This seems pretty serious to me. If they discovered that there structure couldn't handle fully-fueled tanks in a static one-g environment, then how could it possible have handled launch loads? Sounds like they had negative design margin at first glance, though we won't know more until they tell us. Fortunately, it's on the first stage, so if they end up having to add weight to it to beef up the structure, it won't have as big a payload impact as it would if it were up higher.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:11 AMBob Novak says that the Dems remain irrationally obsessed with sixteen words.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:50 AMAt first, it would seem to explain much about Congress, but thinking about it a little more, where would they find brains? Delicious...brains?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:39 AMIowahawk has the buzz on next year's Hollywood hits:
Cold Humpcrack Creekwater: Two retarded Gay cowgirl sisters (Rene Zellweger, Jenna Jameson) defy a fundamentalist sherriff (Hovercraft Phoenix) and discover love in this 1930's period piece set in the Appalachian outback of Nebraskansaw.Snow Fuji Mountain: Mothra (Toby Damon) and Gamera (Orlando Law) discover forbidden love while destroying Tokyo, in this story of nuclear-triggered sexual awakening.
Angel Soft This: In a shocking and sometimes humorous indictment of the toilet paper industry, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock documents the ravages he suffers after 30 straight days of non-stop buttwiping.
Go read it--there are more.
Also, if you missed it last week, Al Zarquawi was live blogging the Iraqi elections:
Okay, this is starting to suck bigtime. I finished writing thank-you notes to the donkey boys' families, so I switched on the tube to catch CNN. Mohammed H. Prophet, can't they run anything but bad news? "big turnout," "carnival atmosphere," "jubilation" ... I mean, WTF? So I Khalid switched the satellite to BBC, and it was even worse. For f**k sake, it's almost 5 hours 'til Keith Olbermann and I couldn't take that gloom and doom shit any longer, so I fired up the browser and checked some of the dhimmi sites.Holy dung, WTF? It's like a bizarro world where people - even chicks - are voting, and they completely freaking chose to ignore it! Helloooooo, dhimmis, isn't this is the same goddamn system that gave you George Bush?
Warning: wild donkey love involved.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:55 AMGood luck, SpaceX and Falcon. I expect Clark to stay on top of this today.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Out of the Cradle will be liveblogging it too.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:25 AMDwayne Day and Jeff Foust have an interesting history of recent (i.e., over the past several years, prior to the announcement of the VSE) internal human exploration studies at NASA, with some unanswered questions:
...who initiated the discussions in the White House concerning the need for a new human spaceflight goal and why? Who championed the issue and how much interaction did they have with NASA? Why and how did the White House pick and choose between plans? Why was NASA’s science-driven approach rejected in favor of the more vaguely-defined exploration goal? Was Sean O’Keefe helped by the existence of the DPT’s studies, or did their proposals for a lunar L1 outpost and a human mission to Mars seem uninspiring, unrealistic, or too expensive to the White House?
Yes, this history has yet to be written, though Keith Cowing has a point when he complains about the phrase "...little has been written about President Bush’s 2003 decision to pursue the Vision for Space Exploration." Flawed as it is, he and Frank Sietzen did write a book on that subject, after all, which Jeff reviewed. It might have been more accurate to say that little has been written about human exploration planning prior to the Columbia disaster.
The story reminds me that one of the problems (in my opinion) with the new ESAS is that it has apparently essentially abandoned EML-1, the Lagrange point between earth and the moon, which was a priority destination for NEXT. I wrote about the benefits of this destination (particularly in the context of a dry-launch architecture) in the Boeing CE&R report. I may dig that out and publish it as a separate piece sometime.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:19 AMRon Bailey has an interesting piece at Reason about why the US is wealthy, exploding many leftist myths about exploitation and overconsumption of resources, slavery, etc. One point that I think should be added is that, while rule of law is important, if many of the laws are dumb and economically counterproductive, it's probably better to have less adherence to them than more.
I'd be interested to see a take on this from an Anglosphere perspective.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:37 AMContinues. And yet they won't call it by its true name:
Five men of Middle Eastern descent were yesterday arrested in Brighton-le-Sands after their mobile phones were confiscated and found to have messages that incited violence. Among the many phones confiscated yesterday one contained a text message which said: "Wake up, wake up oh lion of lebanon. Retaliate, take action ... Show them we have awoken we will meet at Brighton and together exterminate the enemy of Cronulla. Send this to every lion of Lebanon."
Well, at least they're willing to say that they're of Middle Eastern descent. But why can't they use the "M" word? This is about "Arabs." If I were a Lebanese Christian, I'd be outraged, and sending nasty letters to the editor about this broad-brush treatment.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:07 PMMark Steyn describes the Dems' Iraqi quagmire:
The Iraq election's over, the media did their best to ignore it, and, judging from the rippling torsos I saw every time I switched on the TV, the press seem to reckon that that gay cowboy movie was the big geopolitical event of the last week, if not of all time. Yes, yes, I know: They're not, technically, cowboys, they're gay shepherds, but even Hollywood isn't crazy enough to think it can sell gay shepherds to the world. And the point is, even if I was in the mood for a story about two rugged insecure men who find themselves strangely attracted to each other in a dark transgressive relationship that breaks all the rules, who needs Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger when you've got Howard Dean and Abu Musad al-Zarqawi? Yee-haw! And, if that sounds unfair, pick almost any recent statement by a big-time Dem cowboy and tell me how exactly it would differ from the pep talks Zarqawi gives his dwindling band of head-hackers -- Dean arguing that America can't win in Iraq, Barbara Boxer demanding the troops begin withdrawing on Dec. 15, John Kerry accusing American soldiers of terrorizing Iraqi women and children, Jack Murtha declaring that the U.S. Army is utterly broken. Pepper 'em with a handful of "Praise be to Allahs" and any one of those statements could have been uttered by Zarqawi.The Democratic Party have contrived to get themselves into a situation where bad news from Iraq is good for them and good news from Iraq is bad for them. And as there's a lot more good news than bad these days, that puts them, politically, in a tough spot -- even with a fawning media that, faced with Kerry and Murtha talking what in any objective sense is drivel, decline to call for the men with white coats but instead nod solemnly and wonder whether Bush is living "in a bubble."
RTWT
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 AMI already gave my opinion. Now Forbes weighs in.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:37 AMA hundred and two years ago, the Wright brothers kicked off a new era of heavier-than-air flight. I wrote several pieces on the subject on the centennial.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:05 AMI've also declined offers of money to write specific pieces, even though I agreed with the sentiment. I just didn't feel comfortable with it. I'm disappointed to hear about Doug Bandow.
But what would be the problem with this: someone with an axe to grind approaches me to write a piece on a topic for compensation. I say that I don't do that kind of quid pro quo, even though I agree with the subject. But I do have a tip jar, and can point it out to them. If I write the piece that I want to write (perhaps partially based on material provided to me by them), and they like it sufficiently to make a donation of an amount of their choosing, is there anything wrong with that? The only way I've been influenced is by the idea of writing the piece in the first place.
Where is the line crossed? Only when there's an explicit quid pro quo, in which one is being a stenographer in exchange for an agreed-upon amount?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:03 PMIn this corner, we have a woman who attempted to get her rival's hair to fall out. And over here, a fiance who fed his betrothed boiled rats.
Yum, yum.
They apparently didn't agree with her.
Well, in a world with this many people...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:58 PMI agree with Glenn--it's hard for me to get very upset about the failure to extend the so-called Patriot Act. And as with the idiotic "assault weapons" ban, it demonstrates the value of having sunset clauses in legislation. I still think that there would be few constitutional amendments as powerful, and beneficial, as this one.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:23 PMA recent survey indicated that most people graduating from college are not proficient in English.
Of course, as usual, they break it down by race. But what would interest me much more is how it breaks down by major. How do engineers compare to science majors compare to English majors? How about "Womens" or "Ethnic Studies"?
Especially sad, I suspect, might be the results for schools of education, and journalism. But they don't show them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:10 AMToday is the sixty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge. Last year, on the sixtieth, I noted how today's press would have covered it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:13 AMCheck out the subhead at the WaPo:
Iraqi Vote Draws Big Turnout Of SunnisPosted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 AM
Anti-U.S. Sentiment Is Motivator for Many
Andrew Stuttaford has watched all of the Kong movies, so you don't have to.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:34 AMTony Snow makes an excellent point about the Democrats' position--that long-term central planning doesn't work much better in war than in agriculture or industry:
The only flaw in the Orderliness Hypothesis is that it doesn't work if people are present. The war on poverty looked great on paper. It failed miserably in real life. Air-cleansing regulatory schemes looked great in computer models, but failed abysmally in reality. Centralized health care boasted of chalkboard elegance, but is breaking the bank right here, right now. The myth of managed affluence collapsed with the Berlin Wall.And yet, failure has not altered Democratic thinking an iota. John Kerry boasted dozens of times in his debates with George W. Bush that he had a plan -- for everything: dental care, tree planting, street paving, book binding, teen rutting, mass transit, air circulation, steel production ... you name it. He announced these schemes with a sense of triumph, as if having a plan were superior to having a clue.
In resisting President Bush's infinitely variable approach to the ever-shifting situation in Iraq, Democrats have reverted to form. The cries for benchmarks and deadlines merely embody their weird faith in plans. Howard Dean unwittingly captured the absurdity of it all when he announced this week the precise number of National Guard units required to subdue Al-Qaida.
[Update at 11:30 AM]
Rich Lowry says that the Dems are dazed and confused:
The sight of Murtha denouncing (even incoherently) the war was too much temptation for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). The House Democrats’ strategy was to let Murtha take the lead with his surrender proposal, and otherwise get out of the way. But Pelosi couldn’t resist blurting out that she agreed with Murtha’s call and so did most House Democrats. As the political damage of that outburst sank in, Democrats — including Pelosi — began to backpedal. She explained that she would lobby her House colleagues to keep them from officially adopting her position and, apparently, their own position.Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:27 AMElsewhere, in the spirit of the moment, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean declared the war lost — until a furor prompted him to explain what he really meant to say was that we could still win, and that it’s imperative that we do so.
The Democrats can’t help themselves. The party’s attitudes about matters of war and peace were forged during Vietnam, and so defeat is stamped in its DNA. Learning what they consider the lesson from Vietnam — that the war dragged on too long when it was a lost cause — they consider declaring defeat the height of geopolitical wisdom in almost any circumstance.
This is a pretty funny satire, but what's even funnier are the clueless commenters.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:57 AMIs it just me, or is everyone getting redirected to the Institute for Space Law and Policy?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AMSpaceX will be making their next launch attempt at 11 AM Pacific time.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:37 AMStephen Schwartz writes about the real wars in which we have been, and remain engaged, and the fantasy ones in the minds of the left, and much of the media:
The degree to which the MSM, academia, and other members of the Western intelligentsia live in a fantasy world of narcissistic self-righteousness is extraordinary. But the phenomenon is not new. It first became visible during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, the original exemplar of what I call a theory of “two wars, two worlds.” The Spanish war as experienced by the people of that tormented country, involving deep-going social issues, unresolved history, and the impact of what we now call globalization, was entirely different from the war as it was experienced by intellectuals -- mainly leftists -- in place s like London and Manhattan. For this reason, when George Orwell published a veridical account of the war, Homage to Catalonia, it sold few copies in Britain, although it is now considered one of the greatest political works of the 20th century...Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:33 AM...In Spain, the foreign left, and such avant-la-lettre paragons of the MSM as Herbert Matthews of The New York Times, presented Stalin as the best friend of the antifascists when in reality, as immortally chronicled by Orwell, the Muscovite tyrant’s secret police minions worked to undermine their Iberian allies. When the Spanish war became a conflict between Franco and Stalin, it was lost for the left, since the Spanish workers and peasants would not risk their lives for the Kremlin dictator. But a legend about Spain had grown up among the Communists of Brooklyn, who were then numerous, and it remains the dominant narrative about the Spanish war for non-Spanish intellectuals. It is a “second Spanish civil war” that has almost nothing in common with the real war in which real people were killed...
...the MSM, after getting several major chapters in modern history wrong, from Spain through Central America and the Balkans, have now gotten Iraq wrong. They have developed an apparently incurable weakness for totalitarianism: for Stalinism, Sandinismo, Serbianism, and now for the “slaughterers,” as Zarqawi’s fanatics style themselves.
Mark Whittington has further (uncharitable) thoughts about the late Senator Proxmire. It's a harsher obituary than I'd write, particularly seeing as the body has barely cooled off, but then, I've never been as enamored of large federal space budgets (particularly considering how ineffectively they've been spent, for the most part) as he is.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 PMI'm not a smart enough Googler to figure it out, but how did the press coverage of Saddam's "election," in which he won 99% of the vote, compare to today's? Which did the MSM think the bigger story, and by how much?
[Update on Friday morning]
Little Green Footballs has an example.
[Update at 9 AM]
Here's a roundup from last January of how credulous many in the media were about Saddam's "election":
While the network news gurus have spent weeks questioning whether Sunday’s elections in Iraq would (A) occur on time or (B) be accepted as legitimate, it’s important to remember that when Saddam Hussein called a vote in October 2002 as coalition troops moved into place, ABC, CNN, and NBC accepted the dictator’s “100 percent” vote as a credible plebiscite, not a joke. To his credit CBS’s Tom Fenton explained why everyone voted aye: “You would be foolish not to — a U.N. human rights report said 500 people were jailed in the last referendum after casting a negative ballot.” But other networks, desperate for access into Saddam’s Iraq, played dumb and parroted the dictator’s script...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:11 PM
At 2.3% per capita real income growth, real income doubles every thirty years. That is, we can expect our kids to be roughly twice as rich as we are. In particular, we should stop worrying about them supporting twice as many retirees per capita. We should also stop worrying about their environmental legacy. They will have twice as many billions to devote to environmental cleanup and upgrade even if population remains constant.
One thing that would cause the social security crisis to come back in spades would be if, as is proposed in the UK, that social security is indexed to wages instead of prices. If wages are used, social security payments will double when wages double and longevity and early retirement will bear down on workers.
How much do we owe retirees? Is it the same absolute standard of living as they had when they were working? Their same relative position in the economy? These are expensive moral questions. But recognize a promise of a wage indexed gain for what it is: it is a heavy tax on the working to give more real dollars to the retirees than they gave to the retirees while they were working.
I am still in favor of privatizing government pensions, but that would in effect be a huge cut in subsidization of government borrowing. That is, without the whole social security trust fund invested in government bonds, it will be more expensive to finance government borrowing. That will either require higher taxes, increased borrowing or reduced spending to offset.
One thing I can say about that is that my daughter's generation will be twice as able to deal with it as mine per capita.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 03:50 PMEconomist looks at counter insurgengency training and hopes a volunteer army will remember them longer than a conscript army remembered lessons from Viet Nam.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 03:27 PMOn the Internet, not only can no one tell you're a dog--no one can tell that you're his mother.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:24 PMAleta Jackson writes that XCOR's EZ-Rocket flew home to Mojave today, piloted by Rick Searfoss, from its record-breaking trip to California City. It finished its taxi to the hangar the same way it took off--under rocket power.
It was apparently its last journey. It's now achieved (and probably exceeded) all of its original technical and marketing objectives, and its final destination is now a well-deserved display area in an aviation and space museum.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:04 PMEconomist reports that video conferencing kinks are being worked out of both the experience and the business model. Corporations are getting on board. $1.75/minute on peak, $0.25 off peak? If it is being used "around the clock" as they say, average price would be only $0.50/minute or if only during business hours 40 hours/wk at $2/minute. Paying $3000 hard costs for four hours ($12.5/minute) of on site business meetings the past two days myself, I sure would like it if I could cut travel by 75%. The calculation is more extreme if you assign labor cost to travel. If you throw in my 16 hours of travel at $2/minute you get up to over $20/minute for these face-to-face meetings.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 08:31 AMGateway Pundit has a roundup on the Iraqi elections, which are reportedly going smoothly, with little violence, despite Zarqawi's threats. Even the BBC is impressed.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:28 AMIt seems to be a bi-partisan effort.
The level of my disgust with politicians in Washington continues to plumb new depths.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:25 AMFormer Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, long-time nemesis of NASA, and budget hawk (something that we could use a lot more of, these days, though he always made an exception for dairy price supports), has apparently died.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here's the story. I hadn't realized that he suffered from Alzheimers. At least his suffering is over.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:35 AMThe part of multi-culturalism that the left doesn't want to talk about:
Four days after he set foot in Australia, the rape spree began. And during his sexual assault trial in a New South Wales courtroom, the Pakistani man began to berate one of his tearful 14-year-old victims because she had the temerity to shake her head at his testimony.But she had every reason to express her disgust. After taking an oath on the Qur’an, the man – known only as MSK – told the court he had committed four attacks on girls as young as 13 because they had no right to say “no.” They were not covering their face or wearing a headscarf, and therefore, the rapist proclaimed: “I’m not doing anything wrong.”
MSK is already serving a 22-year jail term for leading his three younger brothers in a gang rape of two other young Sydney girls in 2002. In his own defence, he argued that his cultural background, was responsible for his crimes.
And he is right.
[Update at 10:40 AM EST]
It's not just Australia. It's a big problem in Sweden as well (warning: graphic image of beaten woman).
The number of rapes committed by Muslim immigrants in Western nations are so extremely high that it is difficult to view them only as random acts of individuals. It resembles warfare. Muhammad himself had forced sex (rape) with several of his slave girls/concubines. This is perfectly allowed, both in the sunna and in the Koran. If you postulate that many of the Muslims in Europe view themselves as a conquering army and that European women are simply war booty, it all makes perfect sense and is in full accordance with Islamic law. Western women are not so much regarded by most Muslims as individuals, but as "their women," the women who "belong" to hostile Infidels. They are booty, to be taken, just as the land of the Infidels someday will drop, it is believed, into Muslim hand. This is not mere crime, but ideologically-justified crime or rather, in Muslim eyes, attacks on Infidels scarcely qualify as crime. Western women are cheap and offensive. We Muslims are here, here to stay, and we have a right to take advantage of this situation. It is our view of the matter that should prevail. Western goods, like the land on which we now live, belong to Allah and to the best of men -- his Believers. Western women, too, essentially belong to us -- our future booty. No wonder there is a deep and increasing suspicion against Muslims in the Swedish and European public.
"Democracy, immigration, multi-culturalism--pick any two"...
[Update at 11:25]
Not directly related, but it's nice to see that Sweden is finally cutting parliamentary ties with Iran, though it's over the nuclear issue, not Islamic rape.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 AMOut of the Cradle has a list of books for space enthusiasts (though they mostly seem to be for moon enthusiasts).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:38 AMRobert Bakker says that King Kong wouldn't be able to get enough to eat.
There are more serious issues than that. Even if he could get enough to eat, for a body with that much mass to move that fast, the heat generated would be much greater than could be radiated out through the skin (mass goes up as the cube of the major dimension, whereas surface area only goes up as the square), particularly through that fur coat, so he'd cook from the inside if he maintained the kind of activity levels presumably depicted. Also, he wouldn't be able to maintain his own weight on those (relatively) spindly legs, once scaled up to that size--they'd splinter like toothpicks.
No point in seeing the movie, folks--it's just not realistic...
[Via Mark Whittington]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:34 AMRussell Seitz says that Khaddafi, despite his seeming change of heart a couple years ago after he saw Saddam being pulled out of his rat hole, continues to cause problems.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:01 AMA journalist on the scene in Mosul gets it:
I still haven’t seen U.S. troops engaged or encounter car bombs or explosives. But I did see them play backgammon with some local police and Iraqi soldiers. I saw them take photos with more locals and make jokes mostly lost in translation. They gave advice and expertise to local troops on how to conduct a neighborhood patrol. They drank the local customary tea, and many admitted they’ve become addicted to it. They know several locals by name......More than anything in the last few days I’ve heard from soldiers and commanders that people back home don’t quite get it. They don’t see the real picture. They don’t get the real story. Some of them, like Lt. Col. Gregg Parrish, look seriously pained in the face when he says only a part of the picture is being told; the part of car bombs and explosives and suicide bombers and death. It’s a necessary part of the picture, but not a complete one, he says.
It's not long. Read the whole thing.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 PMJames Woolsey warns us not to underestimate the power of the Salafist vision:
...the Salafists' theocratic totalitarian dream has some features in common with the secular totalitarian dreams of the twentieth century, e.g., the Nazis' Thousand Year Reich, or the Communists' World Communism. The latter two movements produced tens of millions of deaths in the 20th century in part because, at least in their early stages, they engendered "fire in the minds of men" in Germany, Russia, and China and were able to establish national bases. Salafists had such a national base for the better part of a decade in Afghanistan and have had one controlling the Arabian Peninsula for some eight decades. They haven't attained the Nazis' and Communists' death totals yet, but this is only due to lack of power, not to less murderous or less totalitarian objectives...(The president's "Islamofascist" term is thus perhaps understated — the Italian fascists were horrible, but not genocidal. "IslamoNazi" would be more accurate.)
Take note, Mr. Simon.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:36 AMA tribute to Dave Brubeck, for his eighty-fifth birthday.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:06 AMThat's what this Marine major says, though more politely than my post title does:
Most of the violent news is true; the death and destruction are very real. But experienced military officers know that the horror stories, however dramatic, do not represent the broader conditions there or the chances for future success. For every vividly portrayed suicide bombing, there are hundreds of thousands of people living quiet, if often uncertain, lives. For every depressing story of unrest and instability there is an untold story of potential and hope. The impression of Iraq as an unfathomable quagmire is false and dangerously misleading.Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:26 AMIt is this false impression that has led us to a moment of national truth. The proponents of the quagmire vision argue that the very presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is the cause of the insurgency and that our withdrawal would give the Iraqis their only true chance for stability. Most military officers and NCOs with ground experience in Iraq know that this vision is patently false. Although the presence of U.S. forces certainly inflames sentiment and provides the insurgents with targets, the anti-coalition insurgency is mostly a symptom of the underlying conditions in Iraq. It may seem paradoxical, but only our presence can buffer the violence enough to allow for eventual stability.
As one commenter notes, if I ever end up in a firefight, I want it to be against these guys.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AMLileks has the must-read low-down on 2005. Warning: some snark, irony and sarcasm involved.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:05 AMJoe Katzman has some thoughts on the nature of true allies.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:23 AMI use Wikipedia, but I don't take it as gospel, and neither should you. Robert McHenry, former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica, explains why.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:57 AMI haven't seen the movie (and have no intention to, based on anything I've read about it) but apparently it isn't about gay cowboys, but rather, it's about gay sheepboys. That actually makes more sense (and I'll grant a lot of credibility to the take, given that it's a lesbian source). They'll put it in anything...
[Wednesday morning update]
Mickey Kaus explains to the apparently clueless why many of us are uninterested in seeing the movie:
My wild hypothesis is that more people will go see a movie if it features an actor or actress they find attractive! If heterosexual men in heartland America don't flock to see Brokeback Mountain it's not because they're bigoted. It's because they're heterosexual. "Heterosexuals Attracted to Members of the Opposite Sex"--for those cultural critics wondering what a commercial disappointment for this much-heralded movie will Tell Us About America Today, there's your headline...Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:24 PM
Does anyone else see the irony inherent in a woman who married a closeted gay man calling someone--anyone--a "deluded cockeyed optimist"?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:29 PMI'm not part of the 94% of the public who believes in God.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:25 PMMudville Gazette is calling for corrections:
THE PRESIDENT: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq.Today's headlines? "Bush says 30,000 Iraqi civilians dead in war."
Emphasis mine. Also, I wonder if the president misspoke. Is he including all the foreign fighters in that count? If so, they're not even Iraqi citizens, let alone civilians.
This is how urban legends get started, and you can be sure that it will now become part of every lefty playbook. And don't expect a correction.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PMVirgin Galactic announced that they are opening a spaceport in New Mexico with $225 million in state money. They are also reported by BBC Radio, Forbes, AP and others to have 38,000-40,000 people who have made a deposit. Ned Abel Smith of Virgin Galactic confirms that in fact that 39,000 is just the number of people on their mailing list, not the number of depositers. This is not the first media exaggeration of Virgin Galactic's prospects. On the other hand, with Virgin Skill's vendor for Virgin Galactic Quest, Fun Games selling to Liberty Media for $390 million with $13 million in revenue and no profit, maybe Virgin Galactic Quest will be worth more than Virgin Galactic. (BTW, Smith said that they are probably delaying launch of Virgin Galactic Quest until the new year, but it is "ready to go". They don't want to crowd their spaceport announcement.) Check out Virgin Galactic's new logo.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 11:54 AMI've already stated my predisposition (or lack thereof) toward seeing King Kong (even if Jackson didn't do the gay version), but Randy Barnett says that it's one of the best movies he's ever seen.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:46 AMTom Sowell writes about one of my own favorite themes: The Media's War:
The Marines lost more than 5,000 men taking one island in the Pacific during a three-month period in World War II. In the Civil War, the Confederates lost 5,000 men in one battle in one day.Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:37 AMYet there was Jim Lehrer on the "News Hour" last week earnestly asking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the ten Americans killed that day. It is hard to imagine anybody in any previous war asking any such question of anyone responsible for fighting a war.
We have lost more men than that in our most overwhelming and one-sided victories in previous wars. During an aerial battle over the Mariannas islands in World War II, Americans shot down hundreds of Japanese planes while losing about 30 of their own.
If the media of that era had been reporting the way the media report today, all we would have heard about would have been that more than two dozen Americans were killed that day.
Control engineers would call this a runaway controller.
When the response to a change is to increase the change, rather than decrease it (which is what, for example, thermostats normally do), change happens very quickly, and uncontrollably. One of the issues with global warming is whether or not the feedback is positive, or negative. That is, does the warming result in even more warming, resulting in...or do things happen at higher temperatures that result in cooling?
One potential positive feedback might be that if glaciers and ice caps melt, the albedo of the planet decreases, which means that less energy is reflected back into space, which could result in further warming. In the other direction, if we are headed into a new glacial period despite the greenhouse effects (perhaps because solar activity dominates all else), then increasing snow cover makes things colder because more solar energy is rereflected, thus causing more cooling, and an accelerating glacial advance.
On the negative feedback side, though, it could be that more warming results in more clouds, which might in turn have the effect of cooling things off.
I suspect that the reality will be a combination of positive and negative feedback mechanisms, and it's hard to know what the overall effect will be, though ultimately, it will be negative, but perhaps at a significantly higher (or lower) temperature. I'd be very surprised if the seas end up either boiling, or freezing solid.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:07 AMIn response to the new Virgin Spaceport in New Mexico, I suspect that Mojave will have to market itself a little harder in California--how about calling it the "Little Bit Slutty Spaceport"? It's closer to Vegas, too...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:49 AMOut Of The Cradle (a site that I've also added to the space blogroll) has an interview with David Livingston, in which he decribes how he almost didn't do his dissertation on space tourism, and how The Space Show got started.
They also have the first part of an interview with John Powell, of JP Aerospace.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:32 AMKing Kong barely got a mention at the Golden Globes. If Peter Jackson had been smart, he would have remade it with Kong as a giant, gentle, misunderstood gay gorilla, and replaced Naomi Watts with Jake Gyllenhaal as the love interest.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:42 AMOrthodox Jews are getting involved in the Intelligent Design debate. And in my own neighborhood.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:13 AMOne of the dozen or so people to protest Tookie Williams' execution in Denver was Ward Churchill. Which reminds me--what's the status of the investigation into the plagiarism and other charges against him?
Hmmmm...according to Wikipedia (for whatever that's worth), the investigation is still ongoing.
And on the subject of the late Mr. Williams, how is that the Hollywood types are so consistent at being on the wrong side of almost every issue?
[Update a few minutes later]
Ahhh...we must have done the right thing--we've upset the Europeans...
[Update after noon]
Iowahawk has discovered one of Tookie's unpublished children's stories.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:04 AMI like the new version 1.5 overall (particularly the feature that opens a new window when I click on a URL in Eudora, instead of changing the last window viewed, which was what it did before, and the ability to move tabs), but one thing drives me crazy about it (as it did in previous versions).
When I download a file from a site, it automatically puts it on my desktop. It doesn't offer any other options. I think I can go in and change the default to some other location, but I don't want a single default location--I want to specify at the time of download where I want it to go. Does anyone know if this is possible, and that there's something I'm missing?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:52 AMThat's become Nancy Pelosi's latest catch phrase about the administration and the Republicans, but Rich Lowry says it's true.
Of course, I don't think that it's any worse than it was when the Dems were running the Hill. But we've come to (or at least we used to) expect better of Republicans. He's right--they need to clean up their act before someone does it for them.
Oh, and while we're on the subject, for those who nonsensically persist in thinking that I'm a conservative, or a Republican, or even a great fan of George Bush, just because I don't believe that he's a retarded Chimpy McHalliburton, I agree with Andrew Roth, who has a list of grievances.
The problem is, as it was in last year's election, that as unhappy as I am with this administration and Congress, there's no reason to think that putting Democrats in charge would improve any of the things that I'm unhappy about, and most of their rhetoric and policy statements lead me to think that it would make most of them even worse.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:43 AMIt's been two years since Saddam was pulled out of his rat hole. And the trial continues.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:29 AMFrom Slashdot readers. He has answers.
[Via Fred Kiesche]
[Update a couple minutes later]
I just realize in reading it that this is an old piece (from over a year ago), that I'd previously linked. Oh, well. It's still a good read for any who haven't read it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:53 AMProfessor Henry Petroski has written many interesting books and essays on the art and limitations of engineering. Nick Schulz has a fascinating interview with him.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:32 AMIn my opinion, the most important thing that NASA is doing right now, in terms of ultimately opening up space for the rest of us, is their first tentative steps toward procuring commercial orbital services. Michael Mealing seems to agree, and has set up a new blog to monitor progress, or lack of it. I'm adding it to the space blogroll.
[Update at 9:20 AM EST]
Michael Belfiore has some industry reaction to the announcement.
Short answer--t/Space is pleased.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:19 AMJeff Foust notes that there's surprisingly little opposition to the RTGs in the upcoming New Horizons Mission (with some interesting discussion in his comments section).
I think that his take is right--back in 1997, when Cassini launched, loony leftists didn't have a lot of better things to do, but now they're so consumed with the war and George Bush that they don't have the time or energy to focus on non-issues like this. As I pointed out in comments over there, when even perennial loony tune Bruce Gagnon doesn't have time to organize anything against it, no one else will, either.
[Update a few minutes later]
Thomas James (Bruce's occasional nemesis) has more New Horizons info.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:12 AMOf course, by the standards described by Nick Schulz, so are many of our own government policies (such as sugar subsidies), despite platitudes to the contrary.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:56 PM...for now. I'm under attack again today, though it was quiet over the weekend.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:41 AMTorah Portion says that Stephen Spielberg is no friend of Israel:
For some time I've asked this question - would Leon Uris get "Exodus" to the screen in this climate? I keep coming up with the same answer. No! Things have changed and not only for movies but for books as well. Again, personal experience, as with my latest, "The Bathsheba Deadline," that's running as a serial on Amazon.com. Lucky for me that Amazon.com came along, the largest of them all put together.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:29 PM
But not so fast. The novel was turned down by a dozen New York publishers for being too pro USA and much too Jewish, too pro-Israel. One top publisher said it plainly, or half plainly: "I really got caught up in your novel; enjoyed it very much; powerful stuff. But I will not make an offer, and I think you know why."
Yes, I knew why and I know why.
We spent the night down in Coconut Grove to go to her office Christmas party, then had a late breakfast on Key Biscayne, and took a leisurely drive back up to Boca Raton on A1A, all the way from South Beach, and just got back. Work things are heating up as well, so blogging might be light.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:35 PM...they're taking this kind of beating in the Village Voice.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:18 AMAl-Zarqawi has been guest blogging at Iowahawk's place again.
Mr. Burge also has a little roundup of news stories that you may not have heard about.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:43 AMMakes us stronger, so said Nietzsche. Ancient man may have been forced out of Africa by a prolonged drought.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:31 PMLeonard David writes about space sports, an activity that many have thought about for years, but now seems much closer to coming true.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:45 PMPaul Sperry and Debbie Schlussel describe why Sami Al-Arian walked.
The amount of incompetence at the FBI and the Justice Department remains staggering and, during wartime, frightening.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:21 PMMe, too.
For some reason, the blacklist was not allowing anyone to comment, because it thought that they were commenting too many times in too short a period of time, even if it was only one comment.
I've bypassed that section of the code for now--I don't have time to figure out why it was screwing up.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:10 AMIn my previous post, someone pointed out that I should flag the offending blogs. I hadn't previously been aware of this feature. But here's the interesting thing.
The blogs that are doing this (at least the few I've looked at) have no flag. Somehow, they've come up with a way to disable it. And it seems to me that that could be their undoing. Now all that Blogspot has to do is autosearches of all their blogs and see which ones' flags are disabled, and zap them.
Am I missing something here?
I may reenable blogspot comments later today, just to see if they've given up on me yet, but I hope that the folks are Blogspot are working this problem. I'm dismayed that I've not received a single response to several emails to their abuse address.
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, what I'm missing here is that there's no requirement to have a flag, and only the blogs that are using some variant on the out-of-the-box template seem to have them. For example, Arcturus doesn't have one. So I guess that won't work. I knew it was too easy to be true.
But that answers the question about flagging them...
I also note that when one goes to www.blogspot.com, there's no obvious place to report abuse, so if they don't respond to emails to abuse@blogspot.com, I've no idea how to report these things.
Once again, I recommend that serious bloggers get off of Blogspot.
[Update about 10:15 AM EST]
I've reenabled blogspot to comment and ping, and so far, so good. It may be that after I shut them down yesterday, they've gone off to greener pastures.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:06 AMEver since the hurricane, my phone and DSL lines have been flaky.
Surprisingly, the DSL has been more reliable than voice (as I type this, I have no dial tone (whooops...) take that back, I have dial tone with static, but I'm confident that based on tonight's experience, I will soon, once again, have no dial tone.
The internet comes on and off as well, sometimes with a bright red traffic signal on the DSL modem, and other times simply not working. Sometimes it comes back with no prompting, others I have to log into the router and manually reconnect.
This is all a long way of saying that life is frustrating as hell right now, and that if I'm not posting, you'll know why. Bellsouth guaranfrickingtees me that they'll have it fixed next Tuesday...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:22 PMOf course, talk is cheap. We'll see if anything actually comes of this.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:43 PMClark Lindsey (whose domain forwarding is still on the fritz) has a roundup on them, including that well-known one in Sheboygan, WI.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:24 AMSorry, Blogspotters, but for now I'm going to have to ban any URL from blogspot.com, until they can get the spam situation under control. I've gotten dozens of comment spams today from various blogspot sites advertising poker, car rentals, golf equipment, etc. I've notified blogspot, and forwarded them the spam for each suspect subdomain, but have received no response from them. I don't have time to fend off these attacks, which come from different IPs each time.
If I were a Blogspot user, I'd be pressuring them to do something about these spam sites, because it's only going to punish the legitimate users as more of us are forced to take the same drastic action that I have today.
[Update at 3:30 PM EST]
This is going to be a tough problem for them to solve. The deal is that these scumbags are going in, setting up a blogspot blog with a bunch of nonsense text full of keywords, and the link to the real spammer site. I looked at a couple of the ones that hit me today, and they'd been set up today, with a single blog post. Once set up, they obviously go out and start spamming blogs like mine.
I don't know how it would be possible for blogspot to do anything about these cretins preemptively, except to institute more stringent registration procedures.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:15 AMA new semi-conductor compound from Intel:
Intel says that replacing silicon with indium antimonide cuts power consumption by ten times while boosting performance by 50 per cent.
New chips employing it are still a decade off, though.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AMA Middle East without Israel. At the UN.
I hope that John Bolton has something to say about this.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:44 AMNo matter how much the media and the glitteratti want me to, I simply cannot muster up the will to even contemplate, let alone actually drag my weary carcass to a movie theatre, to watch a love story about gay cowboys.
I guess that makes me a homophobe.
Just who is the demo for this flick?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:24 AMI know that those of you who've been getting all of your Iraq news from the MSM will find this shocking, but there is political progress there. I'm actually shocked that the WaPo finally finds it newsworthy.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:41 AMI occasionally get grief for my World War II comparisons and satires, but now the DNC is doing it:
"Today, as we reflect on that victory, it is hard to ignore the stark contrast between President Roosevelt’s leadership of the Second World War and President Bush’s failed leadership on Iraq. Even today, President Bush delivered yet another speech in which he failed to present a clear plan for victory in Iraq. Americans understand that the President’s current strategy has made us less safe, and that we need to change course. We need a plan for victory that includes clear benchmarks for success.
But, but...I thought that this war was nothing like that one...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:26 AMSeveral historians and archaeologists interviewed about the find said they did not have enough information to compare its significance with other discoveries in Lower Manhattan. In 1979, the walls of the Lovelace Tavern, which was built in 1670, were found during excavation for the building at 85 Broad Street that now serves as the headquarters of Goldman Sachs. And in 1991, digging for a federal building a block north of City Hall turned up the African Burial Ground that dates from the early 1700's. In both cases, at least some of the remains were preserved.A battery wall appears on maps from the 1760's, but some archaeologists said they have a hunch that this wall may predate that one by as much as 60 years. Some say the discovery of the coin near the base dates it to at least the 1740's. There is no way to tell for sure exactly how old the wall is, but the archaeologists want to study the material in and around it.
And it's holding up subway construction...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:21 AMHelen Szamuely is less than impressed with the new Conservative Party leader:
Somebody obviously told him half-way through the leadership campaign that maybe, just maybe, the Conservative Party should be for individual freedom and small government, so those words did occasionally crop up in his later speeches but these were overshadowed by the mellifluous sound of “modernization”, “forward looking”, “compassion” and so on. And we are none the wiser as to what any of it means.Putting everything together: Cameron’s background, for which he feels he has to apologize, if half-jokingly, his lack of experience (his career has been entirely in politics except for a few years as Director of Corporate Affairs in a media group), his emphasis on the personal in politics, his references to the state as the purveyor of the compassion that he is so keen on, one is left with a cold feeling. The Conservative Party is going to be led by somebody Margaret Thatcher would have unhesitatingly described as a “wet”.
Emphasis mine. Note also that Lady Thatcher is in hospital. It's not clear how serious this is.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:14 PM...and in the comments section of this blog, is described here.
Note, that in this description, I am the debatee, not (generally) the debater (though we're all occasionally guilty of these things).
Oh, and as you'd expect, the other items on Scott Adams' blog are amusing as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:40 PMResearchers have determined that schizophrenics have more sex. Or something like that.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:52 PMThis story about the Narnia movie seems to have a strange headline to me. If it pleases them, how can they be said to be critics?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:58 AM...Inuit representatives complained about the effect climate change was having on their ancient way of life in that their snowmobiles kept dropping through the ice.Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:56 AM
...but very entertaining. Johan Goldberg is making mock of idiotarian Barbra Streisand.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:45 AMOne of the favorite tactics of Democrats is to whine about being called "traitors" and "unpatriotic" when they criticize the administration or the war. Or the troops. And what's frustrating about this is that for the most part it's a strawman, because I've always perceived that in fact few supporters of the war and the administration actually do this.
But it turns out I was wrong. I have found an actual instance of it:
I say to you, all of you...there is nothing patriotic about hating your country, or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.
I want to go on the record, however, and say that (as is usually the case) I disagree with him.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:27 AMLast spring, in a piece at TechCentralStation, I disputed the notion that the world was "using up its resources," and I cited the prevailing belief about the fate of the Easter Islanders:
There was a recent story in The Guardian about a new United Nations study, with the misleading headline, Two-Thirds of World's Resources "Used Up". It's not the first time we've seen such hysteria, and it certainly won't be the last. But relax -- the sky isn't falling. The headline is nonsensical, because it falsely implies that "resources" are a static quantity, and non-renewable. As an example, they often cite Easter Island, whose civilization supposedly failed due to running out of them.
At least one commenter at the time questioned the use of the word "supposedly," asking (if I recall correctly) if anyone disputed that.
Well, apparently some people do now.
[Via Iain Murray]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:56 AMThis Christmasholiday season, do your shopping at Che-Mart.
Heh.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:25 AMSixty years ago today, the fourth anniversary of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor by Shinto extremists, the war (or at least America's entry into it) that was set off by that event had been over for months. We had just celebrated our first Thanksgiving at (what we perceived to be--the Cold War still lay ahead) peace. The nation was looking forward to the first Christmas in four years in which many men (and women) who had been fighting and dying overseas would finally get to spend it at home with their families.
But today, over four years after the events of September 11, as we approach another holiday season here, the war between democracy, and Islamic fanaticism and totalitarianism continues, with no clear end in sight. This is not a criticism of the administration (though there is much to criticize) so much as a recognition of the reality that this is a much different, and in some ways, more difficult conflict than was that one.
One of the crucial differences is the lack of clarity about the identity, and nature of the enemy, at least to many. While I think that the parallels to the fascists that we fought then are in many ways valid, clearly others do not, and do not take our enemy seriously, preferring instead to treat this war as a criminal prosecution (the lack of efficacy of which was just demonstrated yesterday, to the dismay of many, including me).
But the other difference is not just the nature of our enemy, but the nebulous nature of our so-called allies, compounded by the tendency of State Department diplomats to confuse the interests of the governments with which they deal with those of the people that they (often, too often, illegitimately) represent. Moreover, based on the behavior of the opposition party over the past few years, we apparently no longer live in a polity in which politics "stops at the waters' edge."
There may have been some Republicans who publicly declared that "Roosevelt's war" was "unwinnable," but I'm not aware of any Republican leaders who did so. In fact, neither Wendell Wilkie or Tom Dewey ever used the war as one of their presidential campaign planks, though it might have been politically advantageous for them to do so, because they saw themselves as Americans first, and Republicans second.
How long will this war go on? There's no way to know, of course, but surely when one of the major parties is in political denial that it even exists or that it can be won, and when some (too many) in that party seem almost concerned that, unlike Vietnam (their template for all wars) we might win it, it can't accelerate the victory.
In another context, when asked when a technological achievement would be accomplished, Arthur Clarke responded, "five years after people stop laughing at it." I can't put a number on how long it will take to victory, and I'm confident that it will be longer than five years (at least from September 11, 2001), but I'd say that however long it is, it will be that long from the point at which the whole nation, and not just the half that voted for George Bush, starts to take the war seriously.
[Late morning update]
Michelle Malkin and LaShawn Barber have link roundups on the anniversary.
[Update after noon]
Jay Dyson has an appropriate cartoon.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:51 AMTom Purcell writes about a perennial yuletime classic television show that probably couldn't be made today.
[Update at 8:40 PM EST
Apparently, it was hard to make it even then:
"We told Schulz, 'Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television,' " Mendelson says. "When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, 'We've ruined Charlie Brown.' "Good grief, were they wrong. The first broadcast was watched by almost 50% of the nation's viewers. "When I started reading the reviews, I was absolutely shocked," says Melendez, 89. "They actually liked it!"
I have to confess, that I wasn't a great fan of it, though I did like the Guaraldi soundtrack.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:14 PMEd Kyle ponders the current state of the US launch industry. Well, they are making awfully expensive buggy whips...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:42 PMThis has simply gone too far. Even though I'd look forward to seeing Oregon walloping Oklahoma, I will refuse to watch the Holiday Bowl, until they call it what we all know it is--the Christmas Bowl.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:18 AMThe Swedes obviously need to rethink their foreign policy. After all, we know that's always the reason that Muslims are angry, right?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:52 AMI'm wondering if this guy is faking a "hate crime".
A college professor whose planned course on creationism and intelligent design was canceled after he derided Christian conservatives said he was beaten by two men along a rural road early Monday.University of Kansas religious studies professor Paul Mirecki said the men referred to the class when they beat him on the head, shoulders and back with their fists, and possibly a metal object, the Lawrence Journal-World reported.
It's not like it hasn't been done before, after all.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AMIn yesterday's issue of The Space Review, Ryan Zelnio offered a model for international cooperation in lunar development (begging the question of why this is necessary).
Thomas James critiques it.
Speaking of Thomas, I wonder what he'll think of this scienctifically ignorant hysteria?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:29 AMAn interesting historical perspective.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:45 AMHe's going to have to redo the movie, if he wants to get it right.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:29 PMResearchers have been able to achieve electrowetting of nanotubes with mercury. If they can do it with other metals at higher temperatures, it could lead to reliable nanowires.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:08 AMIf true, this could explain Congressman Murtha's recent behavior:
Zieve...dug up a recent editorial appearing in Investor’s Business Daily that stated: “The newspaper Roll Call reported that there might be a House ethics committee investigation of Murtha's apparent improprieties. But, is that possible now that Murtha has become the media's ‘hawk with a conscience?’ Come to think of it, could Murtha have been thinking about a possible ethics investigation when he decided to throw himself into the public limelight last week?”My own BS meter is showing that Murtha conducted a calculated and probably successful operation to neutralize Republicans if they should make an issue of his ethics deficiencies. The LA Times article in June was written while Murtha was considered a war hawk. Now that he's become an "enlightened" anti-war spokesperson don't expect to see followup articles about any ethics violations or criminal acts by Rep. John Murtha.
It would be ironic if he's opposed to preemptive war, but is all in favor of preemptive political spin (as long as it benefits him).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:30 AMNeed I say more?
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research."They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.
"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.
The article also claims that even evangelical colleges are getting disillusioned.
[Via (admitted conservative) John Derbyshire]
Blogger John Farrell has a suggestion for Dr. Behe.
[Monday morning update]
More thoughts on the sterility of Intelligent Design as science:
If we continue with Behe’s analogy, we might expect that the decades before 1965 would have seen big-bang proponents scolding their critics for ideological blindness, of having narrow, limited and inadequate concepts of science. Popular books would have appeared announcing the big-bang theory as a new paradigm, and efforts would have been made to get it into high school astronomy textbooks.Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:36 AMHowever, none of these things happened. In the decades before the big-bang theory achieved its widespread acceptance in the scientific community its proponents were not campaigning for public acceptance of the theory. They were developing the scientific foundations of theory, and many of them were quite tentative about their endorsements of the theory, awaiting confirmation...
...Unfortunately, the proponents of ID aren’t operating this way. Instead of doing science, they are writing popular books and op-eds. As a result, ID remains theoretically in the same scientific place it was when Phillip Johnson wrote Darwin on Trial — little more than a roster of evolutionary theory’s weakest links.
Somehow, I suspect that there will be a lot of demand for this product, at least among men.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:23 AMRebecca Weisser has a sobering article about the real atrocities and crimes in Iraq.
Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein) is a robust denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into the trap of viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism......The obsession of many journalists and commentators with the fruitless hunt for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons has meant much of the evidence of Saddam's atrocities in liberated Iraq has been under-reported. Sinje Caren Stoyke, a German archeologist and president of Archeologists for Human Rights, catalogues 288 mass graves, a list that is already out of date with the discovery of fresh sites every week.
"There is no secret about these mass graves," Stoyke writes. "Military convoys crossed towns, full of civilian prisoners, and returned empty. People living near execution sites heard the cries of men, women and children. They heard shots followed by silence."
Stoyke estimates one million people are missing in Iraq, presumed dead, leaving families with the dreadful task of finding and identifying the remains of their loved ones.
Why can the anti-war left not speak for those victims?
[Via Norm Geras]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 AMThat's what Michael Mealing says.
while I agree with Rick and Jon that NASA and Congress could do a lot better, the odds of being able to convince the existing organizations to change is so slim that its hard to justify spending your time attempting to change it. The political reality is that the various Shuttle derived systems exist because no other plan pays the political bribe that gives NASA the budgets it needs to do other things. Any suggestion that causes the standing army to stand down is dead on arrival. It sucks but its just the nature of our system of politics. Its the nature of any large organization.Does that mean you give up and start cheerleading for the Architecture as the only show in town? No. Did Jobs and Wozniak become cheerleaders for mainframe computing? No. They simply ignored the current way of doing things. While their products did eventually disrupt the computing industry rather radically, they didn't set out with that goal. They did it by finding new markets and routing around adoption barriers.
I've thought this for a long time, which is one reason that I don't devote much (unpaid) time or energy in trying to change the agency or its plans, or even in critiquing them. And Michael's suggestion is exactly the path by which space will be opened up.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:35 AMClark Lindsey has some links to stories and pics about their record-setting rocket flight. Here's hoping that it's broken soon, and repeatedly.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:29 AMIn (where else?) Al Jazeera West:
The documents inspired intense U.S. interest in the buildup to the war — and they led the CIA to send a former ambassador to the African nation of Niger to investigate whether Iraq had sought the materials there. The ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, found little evidence to support such a claim, and the documents were later deemed to have been forged.
Well, at least they're not still pretending that Cheney sent him. The only way that one can believe that he "found little evidence to support such a claim" is to listen to Joe Wilson's continuing lies about it, and ignore the results of the Senate investigation, which showed that in fact Wilson indeed discovered that Iraq had sought yellowcake from Niger. But then, these are LA Times reporters, to whom the default position is that the administration lies, and anyone who accuses them of lying must ipso facto be telling the truth. No further investigation necessary.
But President Bush referred to the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address in making the case for the invasion.
Of course, this claim did not mention Niger (it was about Africa) and it was explicitly claimed to be the product of British intelligence, which (as far as I'm aware) continues to stand by the claim. It had nothing to do with Joe Wilson's trip.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:25 AMThe media is now attempting to defeat us in Ramadi, as it did in Tet:
Captain Jeffery Pool, Public Affairs Officer for the 2nd Marine Division, disputed the claims in the harshest of terms, and rebuked the media for its mis characterization of events. “Today I witnessed inaccurate reporting, use of unreliable sources, media using other media as sources, an active insurgent propaganda machine, and the pack journalism at its worse.”Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:03 PMCori Dauber, an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, looks at how old Associate Press Television Network footage was used to support the case for the faux “Ramadi Uprising” by all of the news networks, and little has been done to retract the charges.
And please, no advice to get a Mac. It's not helpful, and some of my clients require that I have a Windows machine.
I don't seem to be able to update. When I look through my update history, in fact, I can see a large number of failed updates, going back a year or two. There are no instructions as to what to do about this at the Windows update site. Also, I'm getting a message that I have ActiveX disabled, so that the Windows Update site can't "display" properly. How did I do this, and how do I undo it? Or should I? Is that causing my problems?
[Update a few minutes later]
I should note that in my IE Security Options, the only thing disabled for ActiveX is downloading unsigned objects. Surely that can't be the problem on a Microsoft website? I should also add that the specific thing that it's trying and failing to install (at least for now) is Microsoft Installer 3.1 (something that another web site told me that I had to uninstall in order to avoid a different error message).
[Update about 6 PM EST]
FWIW, I just downloaded and ran Microsoft's beta version of their new anti-spyware software, and it found no problems...
[Saturday morning update]
Oops, spoke too soon. Overnight it did discover MyDoom and Netsky on the machine. I've removed them, but I still can't do the update.
[Saturday afternoon update]
Well, I never really figured out why it won't do updates, but I spent a couple hours doing manual updates for about a year's worth of security upgrades, and all seemed to go well, except for one, called ".NET Framework 1.1" for which it wants to install a service pack. Unfortunately, it's a catch-22ish sort of thing, because whenever I try to install the thing, it tells me that I have to have .NET Framework 1.1 installed. When I try to install that, it bombs out.
So I don't know if this is a problem or not, but it's the only thing that Microsoft wants to upgrade that can't be now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:05 PMThat's what Jon Goff says that ATK should do with its "Safe, Simple, Soon" vehicle.
I agree. But we can bet it won't happen, now that they have their own man running the exploration activities.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:06 PMNASA has two new Centennial Challenges:
The space agency is challenging innovators to build an autonomous aerial vehicle to navigate a tricky flight path or robots capable of building complex structures with only limited guidance from their human handlers, NASA officials said.
I hope that a few of these start to pay off soon, to provide incentive to start spending a lot more money on them. Right now, by my count, they're spending about a hundredth of a percent of the agency's budget on them.
Leonard David also has a report on a recent space tourism roundtable in California. The giggle factor continues to dissipate.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:56 AMThis is a few weeks old, but I hadn't seen it before: "I want a realistic wargame."
Speaking of innocents, I want a War Sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to-shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in Red Alert 2. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all, with 30 carriers. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to Hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.
[Via Jim Oberg, who adds,"I would have added, however, an accounting corps who hounded me every few days to provide precise costs of each engagement, including ammo expended.")
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:16 AMWas the paper involved in a murder coverup?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:10 AM...is anything like their aviation program, we have nothing to worry about.
Take that, runway! Who's your daddy now?
("Ladies and gentlemen, please keep your seatbelts on until we've finished bouncing to the gate...")
[From the Nav Log]
[Update at 2 PM EST[
A commenter says that it's a fake. It's still pretty funny, though.
By the way, perhaps Mark Whittington should apply for the job of running the Chinese Space Agency's equivalent of the Public Affairs Office. Given the apparent umbrage he takes when anyone disses their space program, he should at least be getting paid for it.
[Update a little while later]
Mark is apparently as unfamiliar with the meaning of the word "ire" as he is with that of "affront."
Hilarious.
Mark, the fact that you seem to have no sense of humor doesn't mean that my comment wasn't meant to be humorous. I have no "ire" toward the Chinese space program. In fact, that's why you always seem to be so upset with me--because I don't take it seriously enough to have "ire" toward it. I wish you'd make up your mind as to how I'm supposed to view it (or how you're supposed to, for that matter). I also wish you'd quit fantasizing my views on things, and feebly attempting to propagate them to the world. I know that's not going to happen, though.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:54 AMSounds like a huge improvement over the current leadership, to me. Here's hoping.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:15 AMMore foam cracks on the PAL ramp.
At the current flight rate, if they get it off next fall, the cost per flight will be many billions. Either fly it, or retire it, but stop wasting all this time and money on trying (in futility) to make it safe.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 AMI can't get to Space Transport News using the http://www.spacetransportnews.com URL (the one I use in the blogroll), but I can get to it through Hobby Space.
Is anyone else having this problem or is it just me?
[Update]
If anyone is having the same problem, please note your ISP as well, so we can eliminate that as the issue.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:23 AM...if I still lived in the Great White North. Behold, the Chevy 454 big-block snowblower. I'll bet that sucker will toss your driveway's contents into your neighbor's yard. You know, the one three blocks away?
Somewhere, Tim the Toolman is grunting. And drooling.
Get down on your knees and beg, Mother Nature! Who's your daddy now?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AMTwo women were handed pink slips for refusing to flash their mammaries at a gorilla.
Remember this whenever you think your job is bad.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:54 AMHas King David's palace been found?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:50 AMAs usual (on this subject, that is), I agree with John Derbyshire:
Malraux (I think it was) said that there are two reasons to be a socialist: You may love the poor, or you may hate the rich. There are similarly two reasons to get worked up about I.D.: You may love science, or you may hate religion.Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:47 AMMy entire and sole motivation in writing against I.D. has been love of, and reverence for, science, and indignation that people should claim a place for their theory at science's table when they have done no science whatsoever to back it up, and plainly have no intention of doing any, and when their fundamental premises are not merely unscientific, but willfully anti-scientific.
Here's a rave review of Peter Jackson's latest--a remake of King Kong. I have a confession to make, though:
Jack tells me all children - "at least all boys" - love King Kong."He is the king of all the monsters, even better than Godzilla. Kong is stronger and smarter than Godzilla, who's just a stupid, slimy lizard."
Sorry, but I was never a big (or even little) King Kong fan. I've still never watched the original all the way through. I tried one night a few years ago, and gave up. It simply didn't hold my interest, either as a boy, or as a man. The prospect of three hours of it, even with new spectacular effects, simply doesn't motivate me to go to the theater.
Of course, I've never been a fan of horror or monster movies in general (I've never seen any of the classics--Frankenstein, the Mummy, Dracula--and have no interest in them). Lest my all-American red-blooded male credentials be questioned, though, I do like (or at least did as a youth) the Three Stooges.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:53 AMJay Manifold has some interesting statistics on the latest spectacular image from Hubble of the Crab Nebula.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AMWe have here a perfect example, in an area that I've noted previously:
During the whole time I was there [at the San Francisco Chronicle] I constantly pleaded with the powers that be to do the online version of the classifieds right, the way it could be done with all the power of the web. At that time, 1995, craigslist was still a gleam in Craig Newmark's eye. The Chronicle owned the classified space for the Bay Area. I created a classified section on sfgate, but it was just an online version of what was in the newspaper, no more, no less. I argued that we should add interactivity, let people purchase ads online cheaply, have pictures and links, make sfgate.com the goto place for everybody in the bay area to buy, sell, rent, and know everything.But this was utterly impossible. It was a question of turf. There was a large department that sold and processed classified ads. It was a major source of revenue, employed a lot of people, and had a big budget. No way they were going to yield that turf to a bunch of weirdos over at the six person, unprofitable, experimental web site crew. Besides, online ads would cannabalize the whole business. Even as time went on, and craigslist grew and the sfgate website traffic and personnel grew, there was never any possibility of going up against the entrenched bureaucracy. Newspapers are the most old-fashioned organizations left alive in the marketplace. Even book publishing companies are more with it.
They couldn't innovate themselves, because it would have wrecked an existing profit center, but by avoiding it, they let someone else do it to them instead.
This is the fix that NASA is in as well. They can't innovate, because the politicians (and their own internal fiefdoms and rice-bowl sitters) won't let them shed the jobs in Houston and Huntsville and at the Cape that would be destroyed. So instead, they'll be put out of business in a few years.
Of course, given that (unlike newspapers) they're not a business, it's possible that they'll continue to get their multi-billion dollar stipend from Washington, but it's hard to believe that even they will be able to continue to persuasively justify their hyperexpensive elitist activities in an era of cheap private access to space.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:41 AMWe in the space community (and particularly in the alt-space community, though it affects the traditional players as well) have long been concerned about ITAR. Joe Katzman has an in-depth story about its deleterious effects on our defense, and on our relationship with critical allies (i.e., those in the Anglosphere, not France).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:29 AMAlzheimer's may be a third form of diabetes.
"Insulin disappears early and dramatically in Alzheimer's disease. And many of the unexplained features of Alzheimer's, such as cell death and tangles in the brain, appear to be linked to abnormalities in insulin signaling. This demonstrates that the disease is most likely a neuroendocrine disorder, or another type of diabetes," says researcher Suzanne M. de la Monte, professor of pathology at Brown Medical School, in a news release.
If so, that might provide some clues to treating it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:14 PMNo, this isn't a Routers parody.
Churchill is remembered in the popular imagination as someone who rallied a nation, vowed never to give up, and took his country to victory. Few remember that Churchill faced a crisis of confidence two-and-a-half years into the war, exploited by those “with lesser burdens to carry.”And fewer still remember the names of the politicians and media critics who created a crisis of confidence in the midst of a war.
And those few who do don't recall them with admiration.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:03 AMJulia Gorin expounds on dumb Jews:
Ever hear what tough Jewish negotiating sounds like? Here's a page from the Oslo Land-for-Peace process:Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:00 AM
Jews: "Ok, so we're giving you Gaza, the West Bank — "
Palestinians: "Death to Israel!"
Jews: "…East Jerusalem, Golan Heights — "
Palestinians: "Kill the Jews!"
Evangelicals: "Stop, this isn't going well; you can't kill the Je — "
Jews: "Hey — we're negotiating here! Will you stay out of it?"
Evangelicals: "But you're signing your death warrant!"
Jews: "Stop trying to convert me!"...Jews may have been the Chosen People once, but somewhere between Monica Lewinsky and Chandra Levy, I think G-d gave up.
<VOICE="Homer Simpson">Global warming. Is there anything it can't do?</VOICE>:
Some climate experts have said the potential cooling of Europe was paradoxically consistent with global warming caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping "greenhouse" emissions.
How long do we have to wait to fire up our SUVs? When the ice in Chicago is higher than the Sears Tower?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:43 AMThe Space Frontier Society has put together a new feature at their site, called NewSpace News. It has a nice roundup of links to stories of interest to fans of the new (private) space program(s).
Also, Rick Tumlinson has an editorial with some advice for Mike Griffin. Like many of us, he's underwhelmed by "Apollo on steroids":
It's dead Mike. That horse won't run. That dog won't hunt. The fat lady has sung. Or, to bring it closer to space, I'll quote Bill Paxton in the film Aliens: "Game over man!"Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 AMThe bloated, business as usual, cost-plus, pork-based, design-bureau use-it-and-throw-it-away approach to space is a failure. The excitement and momentum that might have existed when the president aimed us toward the Moon, Mars and beyond has been squandered. It has been worn down by the dumping of vision in favor of pork, and the jettisoning of the President and Aldridge Commission's declarations that frontier infrastructure building based on commercial enterprise is a prime goal. Dumped in favor of getting a few folks on the Moon relatively quickly (for these timid times) and pretending that this will lead us on to Mars – with no intention of making either location supportable long term.
I wonder how many people give credence to public opinion polls? I never see any polls on that issue.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:14 AMHere, at long last, is what the world has been waiting for. First came sliced bread, and now, finally, we have the temperature-controlled butter keeper.
Ah, life in the twenty-first century.
[Update at noon]
We do indeed live in an age of technological wonders. How did we ever roast marshmallows without it?
And what marsh do marshmallows grow in, anyway?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:10 AM...a comments section gone to hilarious hell. Be sure to read the commenters' names.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:17 AM