Can't wait to extrapolate to this decade (aka, "The Naughties"...
[Via an emailer--if anyone knows to whom to credit it, let me know]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:15 PMI just did an interview with the BBC, along with John Pike (the embarrassing thing is that I suggested him, because they insisted on doing a "point-counterpoint" format), who continues to denigrate the notion of people doing what they want in space. I'll let you know when it airs, when I find out. Hopefully there will be some sort of webcast available.
[Update at 6:30 PM EDT]
It will be broadcast in half an hour, at 7 PM Eastern. Unclear if there will be a download later. If anyone listens, and can record, it will be appreciated.
[Update a little after 7 PM Eastern]
OK, not right at seven, but it's about to start.
[A minute later]
Sorry, false alarm. Not sure when it will start. I assume within the hour, but no way to pin it down better than that.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:52 PMJust got the news, prior to the announcement. Congratulations to the Lockmart team.
And no, I have nothing profound to say about it. I only saw one proposal, so I don't have any basis on which to judge whether or not this was a good decision. Of course, I'm on record as thinking the program itself misbegotten, regardless of who builds it.
[Update while listening to the NASA webcast]
I should add that I want to offer my condolences to the NGB team, many of whom I've worked with for the last year, and who put in a lot of long hours, for naught. Unfortunately, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. We'll find out in due course what NASA thought the key weaknesses of the NGB offer were.
[Update about 4:30]
They just showed a model. It has circular solar panels.
A reporter is asking about human space experience vis a vis Lockmart. Horowitz makes the point (with which I agree) that no one has experience in developing manned spacecraft. We're a new generation.
[Update about 4:40]
I find it interesting (and a little amusing) that everyone in comments seems to think that this was Boeing versus Lockmart. Northrop Grumman was the team lead.
[Update]
On further reflection, I should add that this is a bitter pill for Boeing (not legacy Boeing people, but the former McDonnell-Douglas and Rockwell folks), because they remember the X-33 program, when Lockmart conned NASA, and pissed away a billion dollars of taxpayer money, while devastating prospects for reusable vehicles for years (something from which the agency hasn't recovered, given its current launcher development choices). I'm sure that a lot of them are thinking that this just happened again. The difference, of course, is that this isn't a technology development program, but I can understand the bitterness, if it exists.
[Update at 5:45 PM EDT]
An emailer who wants to remains anonymous defends Lockmart:
...it's worth noting that aside from the inherent problems with the concept, the execution was botched by Skunk Works, due to a combination of handing it to their "second string" team and lingering Lockheed/Martin Marietta rivalries. LMSW wouldn't listen to Michoud when told that what they were doing on the LH2 tanks was wrong, for example, despite Michoud having the bulk of the corporation's expertise in that area. For another, LMSW couldn't *ever* seem to grasp the notion that they were designing a (suborbital) spacecraft rather than a plane, and indeed continued to call X-33 and VentureStar "the airplane" throughout the program.Thankfully, LMSW has nothing to do with Orion, so the X-33 debacle doesn't directly apply here (aside from the bitter lessons learned coming from the Michoud side). Denver and Michoud are the primary business units involved, so we at least have *some* clue what we're doing on this project.
I'll also add, per a comment, that Lockmart doesn't share sole responsibility for the X-33 fiasco. I would assign at least as much, if not more blame to Marshall, for letting themselves be snookered. It does take two to tango, after all.
[Update a little after 6 PM EDT]
Boy, CNN is really bashing Lockmart, too. As my anonymous emailer notes, this really isn't fair, but it's also not ununderstandable (if that isn't a word, it oughtta be. As should "oughtta").
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:20 PMA previously undiscovered piece by Bach has turned up. Cool.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:33 AMA professor explains. Unsurprisingly it's (you guessed it!) biased and lousy reporting.
Inflation during the Bush administration has been much like it was during the Clinton administration. Even so, back then, we liked the economy. Now we hate it. So, what exactly is the problem? The "record setting" budget deficits, perhaps? Not really. Stagnant wages? Maybe, but I doubt it. I'll take a look at these a bit later, but for now, my point is that any story you read about some aspect of the economy ought to include simple charts like these. Those two stories about budget deficits and stagnant wages -- like almost all stories about the state of economy -- don't do that. You can learn more from a few informative charts than you can from reading the words of a reporter who has an agenda that is advanced, not by showing you the actual numbers, but by using bumper-sticker slogans to create the impression that things are "spiraling out of control." Oh wait, that's the phrase reporters use to characterize Iraq. Well, they don't use charts for that purpose, either (and for the same reason).Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:55 AM
Popular Mechanics has a new podcast up on prospects for nuclear power, who's right about "net neutrality" (hint--everyone's being disingenuous), and nanotech. Along with a Ted Stevens "tubes for rubes" remix...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:50 AMNASA will be announcing the winner of the CEV Phase II competition at 4 PM Eastern. And since I'm supporting one of the teams, good news for me will be bad news for Thomas James, and vice versa.
As Thomas notes, NASA has been astonishingly good at keeping it a secret. It's all the more astonishing when one considers that they had to tell Congress who the winner was a month ago.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:59 AMAlan Boyle reports that Blue Origin has gotten their environmental assessment approved, which was one of the last hurdles to getting their FAA license as a spaceport. It will be the first private spaceport, but it will also be the first spaceport to be licensed for vertical takeoff and landing (Mojave and Burns Flat are only licensed for horizontal operations). I wonder if Jeff Bezos will be open to allowing others to operate from it? I'll bet that Armadillo and Masten would like to use it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AMThe original poverty line was based on having enough money to select a nutritious diet in 1963. It was $3,100/year for a family of four with two adults and two children. In 2005, it was $19,800. In constant 2005 dollars using the consumer price index, the 1963 poverty line would be $18,900. Using the GDP deflator (which is based on changing rather than fixed buying patterns), we get $15,400. That is, a family at the poverty line today will buy different items today implying a $4,400 improvement in the standard of living from 1963 to 2005.
Life expectancy has gone up almost 5 years over that time. The white/black life expectancy ratio has been converging from 1.11 to about 1.07 over the same period.
Both the GDP deflator and life expectancy measures indicate those below the poverty line are getting better off in an absolute sense. A couple more are in this week's Economist. The definition of poverty evolves over time and is more of a curve than a line so that there will alway be people in poverty.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 03:33 AMWSJ (subscription required) says Electronic Arts is joining Microsoft in an ad serving service for video games:
Advertising in games remains a relatively small business, but many game publishers believe there's a large untapped revenue opportunity in displaying ads to their audiences. Many games are played by 18- to 34-year-old men, a prized demographic for marketers that is spending more time playing games at the expense of traditional ad-supported media like television....In the past, companies like EA have integrated mostly "static" advertisements into their videogames that don't change throughout the life of the game ... EA is currently estimated to earn revenue in the single-digit millions from such ads....Such ads must be integrated into a game six to eight months before the title is released...[vs.] "dynamically" insert advertisements into games on a regular basis...
With hundreds of hours playing a title, ad revenues could hit tens of dollars per player which could be billions of dollars vs. millions. In a competitive industry, this should drive the sticker price of the games down.
There is a chicken and egg problem though. Ad rates for games are too low right now for game producers to make the ads too intrusive. That makes the ads less valuable per viewing.
Look for more freeware titles and 100%-mail-in-rebate deals around late 2008 for Christmas 2007 titles that have ads.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 02:23 AMTed Stevens says that he was only (anonymously) holding up the bill until a cost/benefit analysis could be performed on it.
[Excuse me a minute]
[Sorry, give me another minute or so]
[Almost ready now...no, wait, another minute or two]
OK, sorry. Phew. Oh, gosh...man, my sides hurt.
I may have even moistened my pants.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, right. So he wants a cost/benefit analysis? Here's a cost/benefit analysis.
[Evening update]
Mark Tapscott has additional thoughts.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:02 PMMelanie Phillips writes about the media war against Israel:
The level of anti-Israel, anti-American madness has reached such a pitch in Britain that any similar expression of alarm at the manifestly blatant mendacity in the reporting of the Middle East has simply become unthinkable. Yet thanks to the efforts of the blogosphere — notably Little Green Footballs, Powerline, Zombietime and EU Referendum, we can see that the behaviour of the western media during the Iranian/Syrian/Hezbollah war against Israel has constituted a major, world-wide scandal, and one which has the capacity to derail the efforts of the west to defend itself....In short, much of the most incendiary media coverage of this war seems to have been either staged or fabricated. The big question is why the western media would perpetrate such institutionalised mendacity. Many ancillary reasons come to mind. There is the reliance upon corrupted news and picture agencies which employ Arab propagandists as stringers and cameramen. There is the herd mentality of the media which decides collectively what the story is. There is the journalists’ fear for their personal safety if they report the truth about terrorist outfits. There is the difficulty of discovering the truth from undemocratic regimes and terrorist organisations. There is the language barrier; there is professional laziness; there is the naïve inability to acknowledge the depths of human evil and depravity; there is the moral inversion of the left which believes that western truth-tellers automatically tell lies, while third world liars automatically tell the truth.
But the big answer is that the western media transmit the lies of Hezbollah because they want to believe them. And that’s because the Big Lie these media tell — and have themselves been told — about Israel and its place in history and in the world today has achieved the status of unchallengeable truth. The plain fact is that western journalists were sent to cover the war being waged against Israel from Lebanon as a war being waged by Israel against Lebanon. And that’s because that’s how editors think of the Middle East: that the whole ghastly mess is driven by Israel’s actions, and that therefore it is only Israel’s aggression which is the story to be covered. Thus history is inverted, half a century of Jewish victimisation is erased from public consciousness, victims are turned into aggressors and genocidal mass murderers turned into victims, and ignorance and prejudice stalk England’s once staunch and stalwart land.
"Useful idiots" was the term of art during the Cold War. And Hezbollah found them very useful indeed, as Iran continues to.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:02 PMRick Tumlinson, co-founder of the Space Frontier Society, will be on CNBC at 1:40 Eastern
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:27 AMI hadn't noticed earlier, but Rocco Petrone died last Friday. I worked for him in the eighties, when he was president of Rockwell's Space Transportation Systems Division in Downey. He was a key member of the Apollo management team. On the morning of the Challenger disaster, he questioned the decision to launch when he saw icicles hanging from the gantry, but he wasn't part of the MMT.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:55 AMWith the Tigers in a slump, their nearest rivals, the Twins and the White Sox are playing the worst teams in the respective divisions, while Detroit plays the Yankees.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:49 PMIt turned out, like Alberto, to be dramatically overhyped (but I guess it's better to be safe than sorry, and it may still do a lot of damage in the Carolinas and Mid Atlantic). The real hurricane season has begun:
The computer models are very bullish in developing waves coming off the coast of Africa in the next two weeks, and I expect we'll have at least two new named storms by the time the peak of hurricane season arrives, September 10.Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:32 PM
They've started the rollback from the pad. Probably the best decision, since the consensus of the tracks is to put the storm right over the Cape when it exits the state, between Cocoa Beach and Daytona.
Well, at least I won't have to be distracted by taking any trips up to the Cape to watch a launch for the next few weeks.
[Update at 10:30 AM EDT]
It's starting to look like the storm is going to be a little further west than even the early morning predictions were:
Speaking of RECON, it good to have them back in the storm this morning. The Cuban Government did allow the Air Force reserve plane to fly into Cuban airspace this morning to get a good fix on the storm's center. We thank them a great deal. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, Cuban overflights can be acomplished to better warn their citizens as well as ours. The RECON data is so important, a few hours without it can mean big changes! Ok, back to the storm...The latest guidance is again tightly clustered thanks to the valuable data that the NOAA Gulfstream IV jet was able to add to the model suites. This has landfall in extreme southwest Florida and the upper Keys mid-morning on Wednesday as a moderate to strong tropical storm or minimal hurricane, although the odds of Ernesto topping 74mph is very small. The storm should then begin to re-curve to the north and northeast east of Tampa, over Orlando to just southeast of Jacksonville by late in the day on Wednesday into the overnight hours.
We'll still get a lot of rain over here, but probably the winds will be barely tropical force. If that prediction is true, it also means that they probably didn't need to roll back. Wonder if they're thinking about putting the crawler in reverse?
[Update at 3:37 PM EDT]
From my mouth (so to speak) to NASA's ears. As Mark Whittington notes in comments, they've decided to do exactly that.
Good crisis management by NASA. Everything they've done so far is exactly what I would have done (well, in the context of this particular mission), for what little it's worth. The emphasis needs to be on flying this vehicle, early and often, despite the hand wringers.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:26 AMDonald Sensing has an interesting post (with interesting comments) on what the religious status of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig is today:
...were the forced confessions of Islam by Centanni and Wiig valid?I would not count them as valid because there is no reason to believe from the men's reports that they experienced a religious change of heart. That is, the men's confession did not spring from faith in Allah, it was a deed done from fear of their lives.
But, let us remember that the basis of Islam, indeed the very meaning of the word, is "submission," not faith. There is no concept of original sin in Islam as there is in Christianity; indeed, while original sin is the conceptual glue that holds Christian doctrine together, it is entirely rejected in Islam. Christianity teaches that original sin cannot be remitted by any human works, only by the works of God, namely, Christ dying and resurrected. Hence, no deeds human beings can do can bring them to salvation. Thus, wrote St. Paul, "If you believe in your heart that Jesus was raised from the dead and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved." Note the order: confession follows a change of heart, an affirmation of belief. Without the change of heart the confession's utterance is of no value.
But in Islam, the confession's utterance is unconnected to a change of heart. In fact, a change of heart is wholly irrelevant. The confession stands alone and its only point is that it is done, not that it is believed. The entire edifice of salvation theory in Islam is built on one thing alone: human submission to perform deeds ordered by Allah. Islam does not teach that Allah desires human beings to love him; they are commanded to obey.
There are a lot of interesting issues here, one of which is that some Christians would consider them insufficiently faithful, in that they valued their life over their faith (this assumes, of course, that both men were/are Christians--it certainly wouldn't apply to me, since I have no faith other than provisional materialism). They might point out the relatively recent example of the young Christian woman at Columbine who refused to renounce her lord at gunpoint, and died.
As one WoC commenter points out, in the mentality of the enemy, we have once again showed ourselves to be weak and insufficiently devoted to our own beliefs (a microcosm of the larger societal problem of a soft multi-cultural post-modern Europe and much of America, unwilling to defend our own values). It was another demonstration of being, in Osama's formulation, the "weak horse." I'm not, of course, saying that the men had some sort of patriotic duty to take a bullet for the team--I certainly wouldn't have, but it's a symptom of just how difficult it will be to win this war, and persuade the enemy that they've lost.
More practically, in many places in the world, including Gaza and the West Bank, these two men are now apostates and liable to be killed under sharia law (remember the Christian convert in Afghanistan?), because they have since renounced their "conversions." I wouldn't go back to the Middle East if I were them. Their statements of encouragement for other reporters to continue to cover Gaza and "tell the story of the Palestinian people" (is that really the job of a so-called objective news reporter?) may sound nice to PC western ears, but it will have little effect in making the region safer for them, or others. Such words will also be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the enemy.
And I should say that I find tedious the argument that, because there were forced Christian conversions in history (e.g., during the Crusades and the Inquisition), Christians are hypocritical in criticizing this. One is history. The other is happening today. The point is that Christianity has largely evolved from a Middle Ages mentality. In the twenty-first century, Islam (or much, too much of Islam) remains firmly within it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:03 AMYou know, when you have a world of several billion people, with folks on the tail ends of all kinds of distributions, something like this is bound to happen:
A woman in Hohhot, the capital of north China's Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday.
Jonah Goldberg has further, related, but (non)edifying thoughts.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:17 PMIt's starting to look as though Ernesto is running out of steam. Cuba apparently beat it up pretty badly (I always find it weird, and frustrating given that it's hard and unpleasant to visit under the current regime, that while Florida and the Bahamas are flatter than pancakes, Cuba--just a couple hundred miles away--has these several-thousand foot, presumably scenic mountains).
Anyway, it's barely a tropical storm, and will take a long time to reorganize in crossing the Florida Straights, so the expection now is that it will come ashore as a tropical storm, rather than the one or two hurricane that was predicted this morning. It's still headed right at us, though. I'm now debating whether to shutter. I'll still have time to do it in the morning, when we'll have a better idea what's going on.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should note, in deference to the Carolinas and mid-Atlantic, that this storm may still have its say. I hope that they get off as lucky as it looks as though Florida will, but the models for them don't look as optimistic for them right now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:56 PMBehold, a man who eats only sunlight. Plenty of it down in Crawford.
I think that the buttermilk is cheating myself, but it would still be a harsher regimen than Mother Sheehan's current one of fasting on malts.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:04 PMKeith Cowing writes about the inflexibility and fragility of the Shuttle (a subject near and dear to my own heart).
NASA's current launch dilemma began to develop much along the lines of the 70's movie - based on the 60s novel "Marooned" where a hurricane threatened the launching of a rescue mission to an orbiting space station. When things got tough - the Russians helped out - at the last minute. Things are not as dire this time around, but the confluence of various facts would make for a good book someday.Weather has always been an issue for launched from Florida - and it always will be. Russians will be as obstinate as they can get away with so long as they are in the equation for American human spaceflight aboard the ISS.
Given that NASA seeks to used "shuttle derived" architecture and hardware - and launch it from KSC - it has more or less guaranteed that such uncertainties will remain part of human spaceflight for decades to come.
I disagree with him though, that the lessons to be learned are from the Russians, who have developed only a slightly less expensive, and slightly more robust system.
Until we develop a truly robust and low-cost space transportation infrastructure (with full redundancy in vehicles and vehicle types), spaceflight will remain expensive, and rare.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:02 PMWill the future be like the fifties, in which we have to shop for fallout shelters?
We have stark choices ahead of us. It will be very costly to prevent Iran from getting nukes (and to prevent North Korea from proliferating them). It may be even more costly not to do so. And many on the left seem to have their heads firmly buried in...errr...the sand.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:29 AMThe storm track has shifted east again. Now we're almost right in the bullseye, with the track having the eye go right over the house. The only good thing will be that, if the trend continues, it will start to move away from us (which doesn't mean it won't hit us directly, of course, since this is all probabilistic). The bad news is that the farther east it is, the more powerful it will get, because it will be out over the warm Bahamian waters getting fueled, and it also means more chance for damaging storm surge on the Florida east coast.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:50 AMChris Mooney emails me to tell me that his book, about the so-called "Republican War On Science," has been released in paperback today, with a new introduction and call to arms against ID.
As I told Chris, while I disagree with a lot of the things that Republicans do with respect to science, I think that the war is more than bi-partisan. Democrats and so-called "progressives" peddle a lot of junk science toward their own agendas, and arguably (and historically) do it even more than Republicans (e.g., think the eugenics movement). Lysenko wasn't a "right winger," after all...
In fact, it might be interesting to have a blog debate on this topic. I don't think we'd resolve quantitatively who is worse, but I suspect that we could convince a lot of people that there's plenty of guilt to go around.
Anyway, go get the book, if you haven't, and judge for yourself.
[Update in the evening]
Chris has kindly offered to consider a debate. But if I do that (not definite yet) I'd have to read his book first. A review copy is on the way.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:11 AMFor some weird reason, the previous post on this topic was drawing spammers like flies to Michael Moore before his semi-annual bath. So if you do have any comments on it, post them here.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:02 AMNASA needs to get on with the program and get rid of the daylight restriction:
NASA could reconsider restricting this flight to times when the shuttle and external tank, upon separation, are lit by the sun. That was a post-Columbia rule intended to provide good pictures of the tank and its insulating foam to make sure safety changes worked to eliminate dangerous debris. It was supposed to be in place for the first two post-Columbia launches. After the 2005 return to flight mission saw a large piece of foam debris, NASA decided this third post-Columbia flight also would be limited to daylit launch opportunities. If NASA sticks to the rule, there could be just three days the rest of 2006 meeting all safety requirements. Indeed, it could be February before another viable launch window exists that meets the daylight and other flight rules. NASA officials on Sunday were given the opportunity to rule out the possibility of simply eliminating the daylight launch restriction for this flight, the agency did not rule it out. That could open many more days in the latter half of the year to avoid a potential five-month delay in the resumption of space station construction.
Emphasis mine.
They know they have the capability to inspect at ISS now, and most of the major foam fears should be laid to rest. They need to fly as often as possible, particularly given that it's hurricane season.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:24 AMI've seen a number of references to Anousheh Ansari being the first Muslim woman in space, including this piece on space tourism in today's issue of The Space Review, by Taylor Dinerman. I know that she's Iranian, but this is the first time that I've heard that she's a practicing Muslim. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course, but I was doing a search on "Anousheh Ansari Muslim" and I can't find any primary source to that effect.
For instance, in this roundup at Muslim World News, all the story says is:
Moscow, May 8 (DPA) An Iranian-born US businesswoman is tipped to become the first woman "space tourist" to fly to the International Space Station (ISS), Russian media reported Monday.Telecommunications manager Anousheh Ansari, who was born in 1967, may make a short flight to the orbiter next spring as part of a Russian crew, space officials told the Itar-Tass news agency.
Nothing about her religion. Looking at her web site, there's no mention of her religion. She talks about wanting to inspire Iranians, but says nothing about Muslims. One would think that one's religion would be described in an "about" section, unless she's concerned about negative perceptions arising from it. That doesn't mean, of course, that she's not Muslim, but I can find no actual evidence that she is.
So is it true, or is this just an assumption that many are making because of her birth nationality?
I would also note, per this statement by Dinerman:
The industry has a long way to go to get there. The problem is still the cost of access to orbit. Some in the space industry believe that NASA’s COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) will eventually lead to a second path for space tourists in get into orbit. Others are more or less skeptical, since NASA’s track record on commercialization is not very good. Mike Griffin seems more committed to COTS and to the entrepreneurial space sector than previous administrators, but unless he can profoundly reform the system COTS may not survive his tenure.
My understanding is that it's not Griffin's tenure that COTS has to survive, but George Bush's. My sources tell me that the strongest support for it comes not from NASA, but from the White House. That means we have about two years to prove the program's worth with cost-effective milestones. And even that may not be enough.
By the way, via my search, here's an interesting blog by a Kuwaiti girl who wants to be the first Arab Muslim female to go into space, called "So I Want To Be An Astronaut."
May her wish come true.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:54 AMEric Hedman has concerns about the VSE (really, ESAS--I wish that people would be more careful to make the distinction). This is a new one that I hadn't previously considered:
Michael Griffin recently said two things that significantly bother me about the Ares architecture. He said that the Ares 5 is being designed with the requirements of a Mars mission in mind. He also said that he didn’t foresee sending humans to Mars for at least twenty years. By deductive reasoning, the first journey to Mars would take place using twenty-year-old (if not older) technology. Isn’t old technology one of the reasons there are problems maintaining the shuttle fleet? If a Mars base is going to require a nuclear reactor and the Ares 5 architecture isn’t deemed safe enough to launch it, are we just adding a cost for capabilities that may never be needed? Are we committing NASA to using circa 2006 concepts and technology for two to four decades from now? Are we so arrogant that we think we know now what will be the preferred technology for possibly the next half century?
Well, "we" aren't, but those running NASA right now obviously are. It's a normal trait for someone in charge of a major long-term government program. Taking a dynamist approach to developing the future is outside the comfort zone of bureaucrats. There is too great a need for control.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:32 AMShelby Steele has an important essay on the false consciousness of the left, and Europe:
The West is stymied by this extremism because it is used to enemies that want to live. In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that insisted on territory and sovereignty. But Osama bin Laden fights only to achieve a death that will enshrine him as a figure of awe. The gift he wants to leave his people is not freedom or even justice; it is consolation.White guilt in the West--especially in Europe and on the American left--confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression. The West is so terrified of being charged with its old sins of racism, imperialism and colonialism that it makes oppression an automatic prism on the non-Western world, a politeness. But Islamic extremists don't hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism--not their continuance--forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.
But the international left is in its own contest with American exceptionalism. It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power. And this works in today's world because the oppression script is so familiar and because American power cringes when labeled with sins of the white Western past. Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression. And Israel can never use its military fire power without being labeled an oppressor--which brings legitimacy to the enemies she fights. Israel roars; much of Europe supports Hezbollah.
Fortunately, at least in England, the left may be finally waking up to reality:
It is amazing how a few by-election shocks and some madmen with explosive backpacks can concentrate the mind. At any rate, British citizens, black and white, can move onwards together — towards a sunlit upland of monoculturalism, or maybe zeroculturalism, whatever takes your fancy.That multiculturalism really is officially dead and buried can be inferred both from Ruth Kelly’s comments last week and, indeed, from the title of the commission that the government had convened in the wake of the July 7 terrorist attacks last year and to which her observations were made.
In fairness, Kelly, the communities and local government secretary, merely posed the question as to whether the creed had resulted in division and alienation. “Have we ended up with some communities living in isolation from each other?” she asked. That she was speaking wholly rhetorically is evident from the title of the commission: the Commission for Integration and Cohesion. You don’t get either of those things with multiculturalism: they are mutually exclusive.
...This is how far we have come in the past year or so. When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: “If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.”
How "racist."
I should note that the author gets one part wrong, though, or at least it's very misleading:
We are not born with a gene that insists we become Muslim or Christian or Rastafarian. We are born, all of us, with a tabula rasa; we are not defined by the nationality or religion or cultural assumptions of our parents. But that was the mindset which, at that time, prevailed.While it's true (as far as we currently understand) that there's no gene for any specific religion or nationality or culture, we are not born with a tabula rasa. There are innate human traits, one of which is to have some sort of religion and sense of nation and culture. What is a blank slate is which one it will be.
There's a very friendly article toward NewSpace in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required, sorry) based on the reporter's interview with Clark Lindsey. It notes the disconnect between the science-fiction reality in which we live in many respects, and the woefully slower pace of space development, relative to what we thought we'd have:
...the Pluto debate was another unhappy reminder that except for a few astronauts, we're stuck down here on Earth long after sci-fi paperbacks predicted we would have been occupying moon bases or exploring Mars or mining asteroids. It's not as if we haven't seen an enormous amount of technological progress in recent decades. In some ways, we live in a science-fiction world: We carry massive music collections in our pockets, conduct real-time conversations with people across the globe for fractions of a cent and can spend hours playing (and even making money) in hypnotically detailed virtual worlds. Pure cyberpunk, down to the jihadis exchanging deadly tips on hidden message boards.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:50 AMBut at the same time, the science fiction of "out there" seems stillborn -- 25 years after the first space shuttle took off, it's news if it returns with all aboard safe and sound. Space elevators and moon bases? C'mon, kid: Your square-jawed rocket engineers of future histories past are now tattooed, pierced software engineers coding social-networking sites. Pluto's a faraway place in more ways than one.
Or is that too pessimistic? Is there another way into space, one that isn't dependent on the fitful attention of big government and the iffy performance of big bureaucracies?
Clark S. Lindsey, for one, is optimistic. Mr. Lindsey is a Java programmer and space enthusiast who runs the blog www.spacetransportnews.com. Last summer, a Real Time column being decidedly mopey about the future prompted a letter from him, contending that we're at the start of a private-industry-led era in space development, one that would develop more quickly than many disappointed sci-fi fans like me thought. (His letter, and other reflections on space exploration, are available here.)
...As sketched out by Mr. Lindsey, it sounds convincing -- aided, perhaps, by the fact that I desperately want to believe it. Once thing that does seem certain is this: If we're to shed our disappointment, we have to let go of space exploration as it was, and accept how it will be. Don't think of the race to the moon as a first step to Mars and beyond -- that's a perspective best left to history books that will be written centuries from now, if we're lucky. Instead, consider the space race of the 1960s a mutation of cold-war competition, a peaceful contest that caught the imagination of a more-uniform society that united behind it. Put that big-government model from your mind, and the relatively small scale of private-sector efforts to get into orbit may catch your imagination, instead of just arousing cynicism and disappointment.
I was hoping to avoid it this year, but that was wishful thinking. It is ironic, though, that the first hurricane of the season is coming right up the Florida peninsula. Hope it's not a harbinger of the next two or three months.
The scary thing is that the NHS is saying there's a possibility of strengthening to a two or three before it heads into the swamp. It would probably lose some strength over land, but a semi-major hurricane coming all the way up Florida, then continuing on up the coast into the Carolinas is going to cause a lot of cumulative damage, even if it's not as intense as Katrina was, particularly considering property values in south Florida. I just hope the track doesn't shift even further east and scrub us directly or from just off shore, in which case we might actually have to evacuate due to potential for flooding from surge.
It should also be noted that the track of this storm takes it just to the west of KSC. They'll have to roll the Shuttle back (or at least start preparing for it--they could change their minds for a period of another day or so). Probably no launch this week (and maybe none next unless they can get some kind of accommodation with the Russians to resolve the schedule conflict with the Soyuz mission).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:07 AMIn an interesting analysis, Dan Gordon writes that Hizbollah lost, and Israel won, except in the press:
What they failed to gain militarily they accomplished through the manipulation of the Western Media, which were their willing dupes and through the ineptitude and weakness, if not down right appeasement of the political leadership of the International community. This has all but guaranteed that this war will be but round one.
As a result, it only delayed the ultimate war, it didn't end it.
[Monday morning update]
I've had to close comments on this post. For some weird reason, it was really attracting spam--I got over two hundred yesterday, and they were continuing to hit me this morning. If you want to comment, go here. Hopefully the male enhancement hawkers won't follow us there.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:53 PM...from Chaucer. Figures.
Spoyler alert: If ye haue nat yet sene the performaunce of 'Serpentes on a Shippe,' rede nat of the romaunce, for it doth telle of the manye suprises and straunge eventes that happen in the course of the storye, and thus it mayhap shall lessen yower enjoiement of the performaunce yt self.
I just think that it's great that he finally got a blog after all these centuries.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:55 PMIt doesn't look like Florida is going to avoid getting hit by Ernesto. Even the southeast coast (where I am) is in the cone, though to the extreme right side of it. I hope we'll have a better idea of the situation by tomorrow.
[Update at noon]
Looking at the current forecast track, it's looking an awful lot like Hurricane Charley a couple of years ago, that originally projected to come ashore in Tampa, but unexectedly took a right turn short of the goal, and pounded southwest Florida pretty hard. Batten down the hatches, Kathy.
[Update at 3 PM]
The latest Accuweather track seems way out of bed with everyone else (NHS, Weather Underground, Weather Channel). It has a much faster storm, heading up the Florida peninsula on Tuesday (forget about launching the Shuttle this week--they'll almost certainly have to roll back to the VAB). And we're right in the bulls eye (though at least it would be coming up through the swamp, so minimal storm surge).
Everyone else still centers it off the gulf coast, and not hitting until Wednesday. I hope that everyone else is right, but it looks like we'll probably have to shutter up tomorrow. Anyone know why the disparity?
[Update a couple minutes later]
I just figured it out. They have their days mislabeled. They think that today is Saturday. That's a relief, but I still don't like the eastward trend of their track.
[Evening update]
It's been downgraded to a tropical storm. Jeff Masters thinks there's a good chance that it won't be able to recover to hurricane strength in the Florida straights, and could come on shore as a tropical storm or a low-level hurrican at most.
...given Ernesto's small size and the difficulty he is having with Hispanolia, there is hope that the expected 1-2 day traverse of Cuba will significantly weaken him. It may take Ernesto a day or two to regain hurricane strength once he emerges into the Florida Straits. This bodes well for the Florida Keys, which may dodge another hurricane. I think that only if Ernesto makes landfall north of Tampa will he have time to organize into a major hurricane.
Here's hoping.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:03 AMDoes anyone know if a Palm Treo 650 can be used as a voice recorder?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:47 PMIdiotarian playwright Harold Pinter is "written out." What a non loss to the stage.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:08 AMI haven't had much (anything, in fact) to say about the Pluto imbroglio. I do think a lot of the commentary about it is kind of silly, anthropomorphizing an icy rock with talk of "poor Pluto." Get over it, folks.
Here's what I would have written, if I'd had the time and more inspiration.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:18 AMIn this post, a commenter says:
...it is apparent that you hardly ever criticise Bush for anything. You are primarily concerned with the nuttier fringe of Bush's opposition and what they say. The end result is that although you claim that there is a lot to criticise about Bush, you never say what it is, nor spend much time on it.What you don't seem to acknowledge on your blog is that significant portions of the anti-Bush population is _not_ the nutcase moonbat fringe, but people who supported the president but changed their minds because of things that they found they did not like. But you seem to clearly divide the country into "us" and "them" and the only "them" that you acknowledge is the nutters.
A lot of people supported Bush up to the middle of last year, when several things happened. For one, it became clear that Iraq was not getting any better and Bush's pronouncements about it seemed to indicate that he was the only person who did not recognize this. Then there was the Harriet Miers Supreme Court choice, which convinced a lot of conservatives that Bush was more interested in helping friends than in making decisions based upon sound conservative (and intellectual) core values. And then there was hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, where the entire response seemed muddled and confused. For me, I could substitute "terrorist bomb" for Katrina and conclude that this administration would do as bad a job responding to a terrorist attack as it did responding to a predictable hurricane. That caused me to lose all faith in the president. (And the continuing deterioration in Iraq has not helped change my mind.)
Sure, there are a lot of crazies saying crazy things about Bush. But a) they are not the majority of his non-supporters, and b) they are not the ones who hold political power in this country. So why be so concerned about them, when the problems are with the people in charge?
I am concerned with that because the "nuttier fringe" seems to have become the mainstream of the Democrats, and it gets a lot of air time.
I have criticized the administration, and linked to others' criticisms with approval often--I suspect you just haven't noticed. I thought that the Harriet Miers nomination was one of the biggest blunders of his presidency, and I'm livid that amid all the out-of-control spending that he's actually encouraged, the first thing that he could find his veto pen for in five years was stem cells (not that I think that this should necessarily be federally funded). I think that it was a travesty and in fact a dereliction of duty and violation of his oath of office that he signed McCain-Feingold when he said himself that it was unconstitutional.
I remain furious that Bush didn't can George Tenent when he came into office, that he allowed Norm Mineta to remain in charge of Transportation for so long after he refused to profile, that he allowed the TSA to drag its feet for so long on arming pilots, that he allowed that idiot who insisted on dress codes for air marshals to remain in place for so long, only recently ending that inspired idiocy.
I think that the Department of Homeland Security was a disastrous mistake (and the reorganization that it entailed was one of the reasons that the federal Katrina response was laggard, though I never have high expectations of federal bureaucracies). Will it respond well to a terrorist attack? Probably not, but I don't blame George Bush for that. As I said, I have low expectations for big government, regardless of who's president, and losing faith in a president because a bureaucracy acts like a bureaucracy is silly, though people tend to do it anyway (it was one of the reasons that Bush's father lost to Bill Clinton). I wish that the administration had used 9/11 as a justification to refocus the federal government on the things that it's really responsible for and good at, and cleared the underbrush of a lot of the nonsensical things that have accumulated over the decades. Instead with the connivance of the Chuck Schumers of the world, it became an excuse to continue nonsensical things like the Drug War, and grow the government.
There are many other things for which I could criticize the administration, if I had time, and if there was a point. I have said these things, many times, over the years. As I said, for some reason people only notice when I bash the mindless Bush critics.
But my problem is that we are war, and much (even most) of the criticism coming from the left is purely partisan and unserious (if it were a Democrat doing many of the things that Bush, along with his "compassionate conservatism," has done they'd be praising him as a tough president, instead of vilifying him). I shoot down these spurious critiques in order to clear the field for rational criticism, of which he's quite worthy. I'm not a Democrat (though I was one once), but I'm not a Republican either (and never have been), and I can certainly understand why Orson Scott Card is upset with his party.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:11 AMNew York Times editorial page today has an opinion about stem cells concluding:
Mostly it illustrates the great lengths to which scientists must go these days to shape stem cell research to fit the dictates of religious conservatives who have imposed their own view of morality on the scientific enterprise.
This following a piece on cluster bombs where they "dictate" the terms of weapons sales from the Pentagon to protect Lebanese. They have also "imposed their own view of morality on the" war "enterprise."
At least both views of morality coincide on the ethics of cluster bomb use in stem cell research.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 07:08 AMTo paraphrase Golda Meir, so-called human rights organizations will be useful when they learn to love human rights more than they hate the US and Israel. Or to paraphrase someone else--they're not in favor of human rights, they're just on the other side.
We need to either reform them (unlikely--it would require a housecleaning so thorough there would be little left) or form some new ones that could be more credible.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:16 PMGiven that some of the nations who have offered troops for the farce that is a ceasefire in Lebanon don't recognize Israel's right to exist (e.g., Malaysia and Indonesia), and the UN itself doesn't seem to have a problem with this, what would they say at Turtle Bay if Iran offered up "peacekeeping troops" in south Lebanon? Since they don't formally recognize Iran's role in the war, how would they refuse? For that matter, why wouldn't they accept an offer from Syria to help "police" its border with Lebanon?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:38 PMNational Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield is calling it quits at the end of the season. Certainly the last two years have to have been pretty rough on him. Here's hoping that he'll get a lighter season as a send off.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:14 PMLileks' Newhouse column is a partial replay of his earlier screed, but still entertaining. I thought this line encapsulated the nuttiness of the people who worry about theocrats in the White House, but seem indifferent to the ones who actually havea theocracy, and would impose it on us if they could:
...one could make the case that the greatest threats to the freedoms of the West are posed by the head-choppers, plane-exploders, their many merry supporters, and the nuke-seeking state that supports them.But don't expect the artists to make the case. They saw what happened to that Theo Van Gogh fellow. Pay no attention to that imam behind the curtain. Here's the ghost of Eisenhower. Booga-booga!
The artists seem more concerned with a culture that won't let gays marry than one that won't let them live.
And I got a dark chuckle over this:
They take the easy way out, these brave souls; they'll perform "The Diary of Anne Frank," but only because now some people think it has a happy ending.Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:10 AM
Orson Scott Card isn't very happy with his fellow Democrats. I'm sure that it's very frustrating for him to have to defend George Bush, about whom there are a great deal of things worthy of criticism (if so, I certainly share it), but the lunacy of the continuing attacks on him make it necessary.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:09 AMJonah Goldberg talks about the Democrats' latest amusing dementia. So does Rich Lowry.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AMAmir Taheri thinks not. Michael Young agrees.
Longer term, I suspect that the media is another loser, with continuing self-inflicted blows to its credibility in the wake of the fauxtography and willing (and even eager) acceptance of staged Hezbullah propaganda. I hope so, anyway.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:30 AMSo writeth Jane Galt (not the first time she's clamored for this).
While undoubtedly the discovery that most of the tax burden falls on employees will be for some a strike against the tax, and for others a sign that we need some stiff laws to force those corporations to place the burden elsewhere, it seems to me that this piece of information makes the corporate income tax no less attractive than it was before--which is to say, not at all. Levying a corporate income tax is a very inefficient way to do what we want, which is to redistribute money from the company's richer owners, customers, and managers to its poorer employees.(All right, maybe we don't all want to do this; no doubt many of my readers are even now cringing in horror at the thought. But let us posit, for the sake of discussion, that we do want to do this, because that is at heart of all the arguments I have ever heard in favour of the corporate income tax, and even assuming the ends, the means make no sense.)
I agree. The corporate income tax is nuts, and arguments for it are born purely of economic ignorance.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:01 AMJon Goff's musings on essential spacefaring technologies was very useful, inasmuch as it seems to have kicked off a substantial discussion in the blogosphere. One wonders how many at NASA are reading.
[Friday morning update]
Jon has some further thoughts. I would add one technology to his list: routine EVA equipment and orbital assembly techniques.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:49 PMHere's an interesting strategy--Ford is considering taking the company private. That could help a lot, if they have the cash to do it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:14 PMZombie Time has an exhaustive expose of the media's slander against Israel in the ambulance incident. It would be both appropriate and ironic to give this piece a Pulitzer. It will never happen, of course.
Of all the exposés and scandals surrounding the media's coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon, The Red Cross Ambulance Incident stands out as the most serious. The other exposés were spectacular in their simplicity (photographers staging scenes, clumsy attempts at Photoshopping images), but often concerned fairly trivial details. What does it matter whether there was a big cloud of smoke over Beirut, or a really big cloud of smoke, as one notorious doctored photograph showed? The fact that the media was lying was indeed extremely important, and justified the publicity surrounding the exposés -- but what they were lying about was often minor, a slight fudging of the visuals to exaggerate the damage.The ambulance incident, however, was anything but trivial. The media accused Israel of the most heinous type of war crime: intentionally targeting neutral ambulances which were attempting to rescue innocent victims. If true -- and it is almost universally accepted as true -- then Israel would lose any claim to moral superiority in the conflict. The commanders who ordered the strike should be brought up on war-crimes charges. As it is, the worldwide outcry over Israel's purported malfeasances grew so strident that the country was pressured into a ceasefire. The media's depictions of Israel's actions so influenced public opinion that Israel felt compelled to end the fighting right at the moment it was starting to gain the upper hand. And as a result, Hezbollah has now claimed victory.
They're not anti-war. They're just on the other side.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:04 AMBruce Schneier says that our mindless reactions to terrorist plots is a victory for them in itself:
Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers' perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they've succeeded.Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:41 AMImagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that's basically what's happening right now.
Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.
We've had a quiet season so far, but as we get into the end of August, that could be changing:
The Canadian model continues to be very consistent and very gung-ho, developing 97L into a strong tropical storm on Saturday, south of Jamaica, then taking the storm into the Gulf of Mexico as a hurricane.Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:26 AM
Polar bear genitals are shrinking.
Are they sure it isn't just the cold water? I always have that problem. At least that's the excuse I use.
Oh, and speaking of sucky science jobs, measuring polar bear privates has to be right up there.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:15 AMEconomist reports that my idea about doing non-destructive stem cell research has been successfully tested.
Once a fertilised egg has divided into eight cells, one of those cells can be removed in a biopsy without reducing the chance of a successful pregnancy....such biopsied cells might, instead, be encouraged to reproduce—thus generating a line of stem cells.
I expect other people had the idea before I did (I'd be obliged for an earlier cite.) In any case, I presented it badly enough to be criticized by NASA Watch. Now I just need to get the other idea I thought of in fall 2004, Space-Shot.com, to turn a profit.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:00 AMHe's replacing Rush Limbaugh today. Should be entertaining. You can listen live here, among other places.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:28 AMThe British government may be finally waking up. They're starting to ask if multi-culturalism has been a failure.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:10 AMAnousheh Ansari may want to reconsider her upcoming trip:
Zvezda has manufactured seats, suits and other personal equipment for every single of Soviet cosmonauts, including Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova who was the first woman to fly to space. Ansari as any other female member of a Soyuz-TMA crew requires a different bowl for disembowelment, Pozdnyakov. "This equipment is fit for answering both kinds of calls of the nature," Pozdnyakov told Space.com in an interview on Thursday.
[Emphasis mine--Via emailer Adrian Reilly]
[Update at noon]
This part was cute, too:
A woman's organism is different, that's why we need to modify some of the life systems in the capsule...
It sure is. Vive la difference!
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:47 AM...to hear that the latest beta of Microsoft Vista is unstable and rife with bugs.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 AMTwo thirds of a century later, many historians are saying that the RAF didn't win the Battle of Britain.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AMBob Poole, with whom we had dinner on Saturday, has a column on the current wasteful and ineffective state of airline security. As the Israeli columnist noted a few weeks ago, we've become drugged into a stupor by political correctness.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:29 AMIn her vlog on the ridiculous case of Josh Wolf, Bethany puts the hot into Hot Air.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:07 AMAnd remains appropriately obdurate in her continuing skepticism:
The most important characteristics of the Christian God, as I understand them, are his love of man and his justice. If one were to posit a god who is capricious, ironic, absent-minded, depraved, or completely unknowable, I’d be on board. Any one of those characteristics would comport with a deity superintending the world as I see it. But not the idea, as a Bush administration publicist put it to me, that every one of us is “precious in God’s eyes.”Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:32 AMLet me take a banal example. As I write this, the Los Angeles Times has a small item on a thoroughly unremarkable traffic accident. A 27-year-old man in Los Angeles misread a traffic signal, and drove his car into an oncoming Blue Line Metro Train. He and his sister were killed; his 7-year-old son and his grandmother were seriously injured.
Now imagine that a human father had behaved towards the occupants of the car as our Divine Father did. That is: a) He knew that his children would be mowed down by a train; b) he had the capacity to avert the disaster through any number of, for him, quite simple means; and c) he chose to do nothing. No one would call this father’s deliberate and possibly criminal passivity “love.” Instead, we would deem such a father a monster and banish him from our midst. Yet when God behaves in just this way, we remain firm in our conviction that he loved the occupants of that car, and that each was “precious” in his eyes.
How do I know that God could have averted the accident? Because believers tell me so. At the encouragement of their Church, Catholics regularly pray to saints to intercede with God on their behalf for the cure of sickness or protection from accidents. Such prayers would be nonsensical if God did not have the capacity to answer them. When a believer recovers from cancer, he thanks God for saving him. Ditto when an air passenger misses a flight which subsequently crashes — if he is a believer, he will likely thank God for keeping him off board (without wondering why he deserved a reprieve from death and the other passengers did not). If a hurricane misses a town, believers express gratitude to God for redirecting its course. As I mentioned in my American Conservative article, John Ashcroft credits God for keeping America safe since 9/11 (while holding him blameless from allowing the attack to go forward in the first place).
Behold, a tongue made from a tuchus.
Medicine continues to advance. I think.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:56 AMEvery year, with the start of college, out comes the list to help us codgers understand the mindset of college freshman:
1. The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union. 2. They have known only two presidents. 3. For most of their lives, major U.S. airlines have been bankrupt. 4. Manuel Noriega has always been in jail in the U.S. 5. They have grown up getting lost in “big boxes”. 6. There has always been only one Germany. 7. They have never heard anyone actually “ring it up” on a cash register. 8. They are wireless, yet always connected.
What I found most interesting, though was this comment (partially, I think, in response to this one):
38. Being techno-savvy has always been inversely proportional to age.
...My daughter and oldest son (20 and 22), both learned to drive a standard shift and are very good at it. My daughter, who needed a car for where she went to school (had to drive to several remote sites for classes) acquired a 1993 5-speed Honda. Upon returning from school, she complained that it would lose power going up long hills. They are bright and alert to the world, and would have few problems with the 75 items in the list, including having played the “state licence plate game.” My most recent failing as a father, though? Not having taught them to downshift.
Young people are certainly early adaptors when it comes to using new technology, and faster to pick up the user interface. But I'm not sure that the current generation actually understands the technology that it uses as much as previous ones did. They don't have to understand how things work, because we rarely fix things any more, and when we do, we take them to professionals to do so. Electronics are lost, or become obsolete, before they stop working, and even when they do break, they're rarely fixable, and are cheap enough to simply replace. Cars break down, but few people work on them (partly because things are so densely packed in them that it's quite difficult these days), other than those who do it professionally.
I just wonder if not understanding why and when to shift a manual transmission is a symptom of this. It just struck me as an interesting metaphor. For something.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:34 AMJon Goff writes about technologies necessary to a spacefaring civilization that NASA is avoiding developing, instead pouring most of its resources into new and expensive (and probably ultimately unaffordable) launch systems.
[Afternoon update]
Clark Lindsey notes an omission. I agree, tugs are important as well. And NASA's not working on one of those, either.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:02 AMGlenn Reynolds' recent book gets a bad review over at Government Executive (what a shock...).
He cites the actions of the passengers on Flight 93 on Sept. 11, who used cell phones to find out what had happened at the World Trade Center and improvised their own heroic form of resistance to the terrorists on their plane within 109 minutes. "Against bureaucracies," he concludes, "terrorists had the advantage. Against civilians, they did not."In those limited circumstances, that might be true -- although one would assume a planeload of bureaucrats, under the same conditions, would have made the same decision as the civilians on Flight 93.
That's amusing, and irrelevant. Because they wouldn't be acting as bureaucrats in that situation--they'd be acting as passengers on an airplane, just as the...ummmm...passengers on an airplane acted.
It's useful to note that when people criticize big government (at this website, the target is often NASA), it's not (necessarily) criticism of the people who work for the big government. People, good people, respond to the situation in which they find themselves, and they also respond to the incentives inherent in that system. I've noted in the past that many NASA employees, once freed from their bondage from the agency, will say "how could I have made that decision?" As if awakening from a strange, and frightening dream. (I should add, with respect to the link, that I get a certain amount of gratification from the knowledge that the number one link for "emergent stupidity" on the search engines seems to be mine...)
So people on the plane, regardless of what they do at their day jobs, are going to do what people on the plane will do. It's not about the people--it's about the system in which they operate (something that I'm not sure that Mike Griffin, the new NASA administrator, understands...)
So his point in fact has no point.
I also find it interesting, and revealing, that he made the error of mistaking Glenn's employer. While (based on some recent commenters here) leftists (I refuse any more to dignify their beliefs with the term "liberals," which rightly belongs to classical ones) or "progressives" (another term I hate--it's kind of like Bolsheviks, in that it begs the question) hate the south, of which Tennessee is definitely a part, they seem to reserve special scorn and vitriol for Texas (perhaps because Bushitler and Halliburton come from there). If his eyes were impinged by the word "Tennessee" and he saw the other "T" word, that says something about his outlook, to me. But perhaps there's a more innocent explanation.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:46 PMSome thoughts from Razib, over at Gene Expression.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:54 PMTravis Johnson writes about SpaceDev's prospects, with the loss of its COTS bid. I'm not sure he understands Rocketplane Kistler, though:
Rocketplane Kistler arguably has the design that's most like SpaceDev's DreamChaser, in that it's based on a spaceplane design somewhat like a smaller version of the current shuttle, so if there was a spot for SpaceDev on this contract I expect we have Rocketplane to blame for them not getting it. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is essentially a capsule that rides on the Falcon launch vehicle.
I have no idea what he's talking about here (perhaps because he has no idea what he's talking about, either). There is no resemblance whatsoever between the Shuttle, Dreamchaser or the Kistler orbital vehicle.
Well, all right, there's a superficial resemblance between Dreamchaser and the Shuttle, in that they're both vertical takeoff/horizontal landing vehicles. But neither of them look anything like the Kistler vehicle, which returns a capsule with no wings at all (via parachute, I believe). Perhaps he is confused by the Rocketplane XP (a Learjet derivative), but that has nothing to do with COTS--it's a suborbital vehicle only.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:06 AMDoomsday isn't all it's cracked up to be. I'm sure the end will be along any minute, though...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:10 AMIn today's Wall Street Journal, "The Fertility Gap" between Democrats and Republicans is analyzed:
According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated, politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given the fact that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections.
For a less politically correct treatment, here's an earlier article with stark graphs (that's free):
The white people in Republican-voting regions consistently have more children than the white people in Democratic-voting regions.
But that's just the facts. The philosophy question is more interesting.
If the adults have less than 200+ children by the time they die, their philosophy will have to spread faster than their progeny because at less than replacement rate the base of supporters will shrink. In mathematical terms, a stochastic series with an average geometric mean less than one will converge at 0.
In population terms, subpopulations with less fertility than replacement values will die out.
Religions with an admonishment to be fruitful and multiply will last longer than competing ones. Philosophies that call for zero or negative population growth will commit suicide in a whisp of finite time. It doesn't take many generations for a philosophy to die out. A philosophy that garners 3/4 of the previous generation's adherents will go from 150 million adherents to 1,500 aherents in 40 generations.
Optimism about the human condition is selected for. People who believe in Julian Simon's theory of plentiful commodities and bountiful technology (The Ultimate Resource 2) will be more fertile than the worriers about carbon pollution and the population problem du jour. The former ideas have positive probability of being eternal.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 08:09 AMProbably won't do that well in Brighton Beach or Boca, though.
Behold, the Hitler-themed restaurant.
Maybe they could make a Broadway musical about it. Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "soup Nazi."
[Update on Monday evening]
Per the comment section, can anyone come up with a menu for the (obviously) much worse George Bush Cafe? Instead of a swastika, it would have the Halliburton corporate symbol, of course.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:14 AMA man with two penes.
I expect Trojan endorsement offers any day now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:09 AMAbout a week ago, I asked:
I wonder if I could dig up an old interview by Mike Wallace with Hitler, in which Mr. Wallace told us how reasonable, rational and serious he seemed? All they wanted was Lebensraum, after all.
In fact, I thought about seeing if I could dig it up on Routers, but I didn't have the time, and it now turns out that Philip Klein already did it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:30 AMLileks has a long but entertaining (and, can you believe it?--dripping with snark) screed disguised as a bleat today, on childish pseudointellectuals who fancy themselves courageous for speaking truth to the Man. Errrr...actually to the Mouse.
Three hundred years from now they’ll be performing plays about the Red Scare ( it’s really an allegory about the Salem Witch Trials!) or showing “The Front” to adoring cineastes who secretly wish they’d been Communists in the 50s. It was so romantic. Oh, to live in an age where you could be blacklisted. you didn't go to jail, you were ever so tragic, and you had lovers and smoked angrily and wrote a novel about it that just showed everyone. But this play, as noted, has a new twist on the usual scenario: it’s about brave young idealists working for Walt Disney, who, as we know, was an FBI agent and rabid anti-Semite. Hence those famous cartoons “Pinocchio the Jew,” “Snow Aryan and the Seven Undermenschen,” and all those pro-Allied cartoons. Why did Donald make fun of Hitler? Because he wasn’t getting the job done fast enough, that’s why.For a notorious Jew-hater, Walt did a remarkable job of keeping it out of his work; after all, the point of Dumbo isn’t the need to sterilize the defective elephant.
In any case, the play seems to get a little bit of history wrong. As the Cartoon Brew review notes, a brash idealistic newcomer who tried to unionize the cartoonists in the 50s would have been informed that they’d had a union since 1942. But that matters little to the playwright, because the premise is so delicious. It matters not a bit that millions of people enjoyed Mickey cartoons; what counts is pointing out that an actual mouse would have carried disease and left behind fecal matter. And here it is! Fecal matter! We found it! Ergo . . . uh, well, ergo something, and thank you, we are brave. Very.
He's not impressed with his generation, the boomers.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:47 AMSome people, unaccountably, are curious as to how my rib barbecue turned out last night.
Pretty good, though not as tender (read, falling off the bone) as the Fourth of July version, because I was attempting to avoid that, so the meat wouldn't fall off the bone while grilling it and be wasted in the nether regions of the grill.
I made up a marinade of apple vinegar, lemon juice, a bottle of Shiner Bock (just to piss off the Texas haters in the crowd), garlic, hot sauce and other chile derivatives, bay leaves, oregano, thyme, salt, fresh-ground pepper, and whatnot (sorry, I'd provide quantities, but I didn't pay much attention--you'll have to do it to taste, and I know that novice cooks hate those words...). I put it in the bottom of the pan and slow cooked the ribs, rib side down, in the oven at 250 F for about three or four hours. Then I put the ribs on the grill (indirect heat) and continued to baste with the marinade, turning occasionally, for another hour and a half or so. I took about half the marinade, added honey and tomato sauce and paste for a sauce, and heated it on the stove. I basted this on for the last few minutes (so as not to allow the sugar to burn), then saved the rest for adding at the table.
They came out pretty good, definitely cooked, and little left but bone after eating, but they held together throughout until time to actually pull the meat off with teeth.
So I'd say it was a success.
Oh, and I should add, not to name drop or anything, that the guests were fellow and recent (though he was born and raised here) south Floridians Bob Poole and his wife Lou Villadsen, of the Reason Foundation. I may have an interview with him on the current airline security fiasco shortly, in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Which makes it all the better that the ribs came out well...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:26 PMYou know, there was a time in the British Empire that this would be considered an act of war:
The Sunday Telegraph revealed in April that Iranian-made de-vices employing several EFPs, directed at different angles, were being used in Iraq.And in June, this newspaper obtained the first picture of one of the Iraqi insurgent weapons - designed to fire an armour-piercing EFP - believed to have been responsible for the deaths of 17 British soldiers.
Apparently, for all the talk of the "war mongers" Bush and Blair, war (or at least waging a war that one is actually in, like it or not) has gone out of fashion in the west. And the Iranians and Syrians are taking full advantage of that fact.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:56 PMRoger Scruton says that the problem with Islamists is that they take themselves too seriously:
Now of course it is wrong to give gratuitous offence to people of other faiths; it is right to respect people's beliefs, when these beliefs pose no threat to civil order; and we should extend toward resident Muslims all the toleration and neighborly goodwill that we hope to receive from them. But recent events have caused people to wonder exactly where Muslims stand in such matters. Although Islam is derived from the same root as salaam, it does not mean peace but submission. And although the Koran tells us that there shall be no compulsion in matters of religion, it does not overflow with kindness toward those who refuse to submit to God's will. The best they can hope for is to be protected by a treaty (dhimmah), and the privileges of the dhimmi are purchased by onerous taxation and humiliating rites of subservience. As for apostates, it remains as dangerous today as it was in the time of the prophet publicly to renounce the Muslim faith. Even if you cannot be compelled to adopt the faith, you can certainly be compelled to retain it. And the anger with which public Muslims greet any attempt to challenge, to ridicule or to marginalize their faith is every bit as ferocious as that which animated the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. Ordinary Christians, who suffer a daily diet of ridicule and skepticism, cannot help feeling that Muslims protest too much, and that the wounds, which they ostentatiously display to the world, are largely self-inflicted.
He also notes that for this reason, and others, "fascist" is not an unreasonable word with which to describe them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 PM...from the Arab world. Our challenge in this war is to make them majority (and vast majority) views.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:25 PMThat's apparently what Larry Tribe thinks about yesterday's (appalling--at least, even by supporters of it, from the standpoint of the reasoning) judicial ruling.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:22 PMJupiter's spots may be disappearing, as a result of climate change.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:38 PMElizabeth Wolff has to have been waiting years to write this phrase:
Bill Clinton is a sexagenerian.
Warning, though. Have a barf bag ready for the praise from his fans.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:47 PMOnly two days until Iran's promised response (like we can trust their promises?) to the UN ultimatum, here's a roundup of relevant and interesting links. Here's one:
Americans are now most aware of the Iranian role in promoting fascism: 58 percent in the poll think Iran is now the "main promoter of Islamic fascism in the Middle East," and 76 percent believe Iran must be prevented from obtaining nuclear weapons "at any cost."Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:33 AM
Ed Kyle has a new lunar architecture proposal (or rather, a variant on an old NASA lunar architecture proposal). It's an improvement on ESAS (a low bar, of course), but it would still be horrendously expensive, and in the long run, neither affordable or sustainable.
[Update]
Sorry, link is fixed now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:20 AMA (brave) British Muslim MP says that those British Muslims who pine for sharia law should move to Saudi Arabia.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:09 AMMichael Widlanski isn't very impressed with PM Olmert, either:
As the combat has trailed off in Lebanon, it can now be said that whatever Israel’s losses, it has discovered a great comedic genius: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert—a man who sent his army to war, but only after tying its shoelaces together.In fact, Olmert is more than a performing comedic artist; he is also a director of a war cabinet that encompasses a veritable Shakespearean company performing a seemingly endless comedy of errors.
It's dismaying in the short run, but in the long run, this loss may be good news, if it results in Israel finally taking its enemies seriously. Ralph Peters agrees:
...what on earth might give us cause for hope?* Israel's recent defeat, for one thing. Yes, you read that right. The truth is that Israel got a relatively cheap, if embarrassing, wake-up call. And Israel's a part of Western civilization, not of the Middle East's decaying cultures. That means that Israel doesn't just wallow in blame - like Americans, Israelis figure out what went wrong and then fix it. After the post-war soul-searching and investigations are finished, failed leaders will be replaced and Israel will re-emerge with a renewed sense of mission, a stronger government and a powerfully reformed military - the next time the IDF goes to war, watch the way it devastates its enemies.
* The "unity of Muslims" confronting the West is history (it was always a bogus, ramshackle affair). Sunni-Arab leaders increasingly grasp that the real threat isn't from the United States or Israel, but from the explosion of Shia ambitions, prowess, wealth and desire for vengeance. The future of the Middle East could go a number of ways, but we may find ourselves as bemused spectators, while our sworn enemies and phony friends kill each other. Afterward, we'll pick up the pieces.
... The florid American master of horror fiction, H. P. Lovecraft, warned his characters, "Do not raise up what ye cannot put down." Islamist terrorists are reviving the West's thirst for blood. And this time it won't be slaked in Flanders.
Things are going to get uglier east of Suez. And we're going to win.
Yes, if not now, then soon, I suspect that the Islamists (whose knowledge of American history seems to end no earlier than the late sixties) are going to (like Yamamoto) "wake up a sleeping giant," and they're oblivious to the consequences.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:11 AMCaroline Glick has a depressing, and entirely plausible (and in fact likely) analysis of the inevitability of war in the Middle East, and Israel's need to prepare for it now (which probably includes forming a new, competent government).
Just one disagreement. Israel will not have to go to war with Iran. Israel has been at war with Iran (and Syria) for years, only via proxie.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:45 AMFrom The Economist:
In an effort to reel in photography, camera-makers are making it more obvious when images have been altered.One way of doing this is to use image-authentication systems to reveal if someone has tampered with a picture. These use computer programs to generate a code from the very data that comprise the image. As the picture is captured, the code is attached to it. When the image is viewed, software determines the code for the image and compares it with the attached code. If the image has been altered, the codes will not match, revealing the doctoring.
Another way favoured by manufacturers is to take a piece of data from the image and assign it a secret code. Once the image file is transferred to a computer, it is given the same code, which will change if it is edited. The codes will match if the image is authentic but will be inconsistent if tampering occurred.
Digital signatures, just as I suggested. But even that won't be guaranteed:
...forgers have become adept at printing and rescanning images, thus creating a new original. In such cases, analysing how three-dimensional elements interact is key.
Yup. So we'll also need the army of photographers, for independent views of the event in question, and an army of ever-more-sophisticated bloggers to keep the forgers honest (or at least catch them when they're not).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:05 AMI'm having guests over for baby back ribs tonight, and am looking at recipes on line. I hadn't really perused them before, but there seem to be as many ways to do it as there are recipes. Some say cook on the grill, a few minutes on a side, some say on the grill for an hour and a half, some say braise in the oven first, some say dry rub, some say marinate, for a few hours or overnight.
It's almost like it's hard to do it wrong, but I'm going crazy trying to figure out which way to do it. On the Fourth, I slow cooked some in the oven for hours in a marinade, then grilled them, but the meat was falling off the bone, so while they tasted great, they were hard to handle on the grill. And those were back ribs, but not baby back. Any suggestions?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:30 AMWe're already starting to see dire consequences of Israel's disastrous war. Al Aqsa thinks that it now knows how to defeat Israel:
"Hizbullah proved what we have already known and felt here in a number of opportunities. The Israelis are lying when they paint their military as unbeatable. A few hundred Hizbullah fighters showed them what an army is, and how to conduct a battle."According to Abu Nasser, Nasrallah's organization still hasn't had its last word.
"From our acquaintance with them, there is no way they are going to disarm. The organization has strategic objectives and the current battle proves that if it will decide to initiate another battle – the road is paved. The next time Iran will be in the picture and missiles on Tel Aviv will be part of the game. When this happens, it will be a lot easier for us. We are proud of our brothers, the Hizbullah fighters. They are inspirational teachers that demonstrated everything we have been feeling in recent years – Israel is falling apart," he said.
Many of the Arabs are now feeling their oats, and the street in Damascus may be starting to demand (foolishly) that the chinless optometrist take back the Golan Heights. This would be an effort doomed to failure, of course, but the enemy, heady with their recent success, don't understand that.
It's a cliche that it's hopelessness that causes the Arabs to behave the way they do toward Israel, but in fact, the opposite is true. It's when they have hope that they become most aggressive, and Israel's failed campaign has provided them with an overabundance of it. The next battle is not a question of if, but when and where, and whether Israel will be ready for it this time (perhaps with a new government). It also makes it all the more incumbent for Israel to procure and develop effective defenses against missiles.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:29 AMI shouldn't have to tell regular readers this, but not all who come here are regular readers. Clark Lindsey has a blow-by-blow of the COTS announcement, an RpK press release, and other info.
He does this stuff, so I don't have to.
[Update on Saturday morning]
Clark has another set of links, and an idiotic quote (are there any other kind?) from John Pike.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:33 PMIs it really true that a man offering a woman a seat on public transportation is creepy?
Then call me a neanderthal creep.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:35 PMHeather McDonald has been steadfastly arguing over at NRO that political conservativism doesn't need to have a God, and that in arguing the success of Judeo-Christianity, many religious conservatives may be confusing cause and effect (I think there's a powerful Anglosphere angle here...). While I'm not a conservative, I agree with everything in this post.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:30 PMCOTS finalists are supposed to be announced in a couple hours.
Clark Lindsey has an overview of the program, and links (including one to the webcast of the announcement, which will occur at 4 PM Eastern).
[Update shortly after begin of announcement]
Just said that two have been selected. So we know they're not going to be spreading money thin.
Well, that didn't take long. SpaceX and RpK.
That means two (partially) reusable vehicle companies.
[Update a minutes later]
Well, I see via comments that I didn't have to liveblog it. An army of reporters!
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:19 AMHas the oil fever finally peaked?
...the recent record-high prices have fueled a boom in exploration. And as that boom begins to yield more oil, the industry will gain a greater ability to ramp up production in one place in order to make up for any shortfall elsewhere.This should reduce the impact of a supply disruption in, say, Iran or Nigeria, and ease what experts refer to as the security premium that's currently build into oil prices.
"That [premium] is in the neighborhood of $25 dollars a barrel," said James Williams, an energy economist at the consultancy WTRG Economics. "That number would go away, or most of it would go away, if we had more spare production capacity."
And that's not even considering shale and the tar sands, which are now coming on line, and will remain that way, as long as prices don't drop back into the twenties.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:16 AMEnvironmentalists (most notably, recently, Jared Diamond) are fond of using Easter Island as a cautionary tale of what happens when resources are depleted in a non-renewable manner. Well, it's looking a lot like this example is a fairy tale:
By the time the second round of radiocarbon results arrived in the fall of 2005, a complete picture of Rapa Nui's prehistory was falling into place. The first settlers arrived from other Polynesian islands around 1200 A.D. Their numbers grew quickly, perhaps at about three percent annually, which would be similar to the rapid growth shown to have taken place elsewhere in the Pacific. On Pitcairn Island, for example, the population increased by about 3.4 percent per year following the appearance of the Bounty mutineers in 1790. For Rapa Nui, three percent annual growth would mean that a colonizing population of 50 would have grown to more than a thousand in about a century. The rat population would have exploded even more quickly, and the combination of humans cutting down trees and rats eating the seeds would have led to rapid deforestation. Thus, in my view, there was no extended period during which the human population lived in some sort of idyllic balance with the fragile environment.It also appears that the islanders began building moai and ahu soon after reaching the island. The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island's trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued.
I'm sure that the argument now will be that they were about to collapse any year now, but the evil white men killed them before they had a chance to.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:51 AMAndy McCarthy points out the cognitive dissonance of the ACLU and New York Times:
...which is it? Is the TSP leak a big nothing that changed no one's behavior, or a bombshell that changed everyone's behavior? Evidently, it depends on which scenario the Left believes will damage the Bush administration more on any given day.Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:42 AM
Here's an interesting article on the history of Israeli military conflicts, and why they lost (or at least didn't win, making another inevitable soon) this one.
I'm too busy to post much on this right now, but this leads to a much bigger theme. One of the damaging things that the UN has done over the decades is to short-circuit many conflicts, causing them to actually go on unabated for years, albeit at a lower level with flareups, because its emphasis and urgency is always on band-aid ceasefires and halting fighting, rather than achieving true peace or justice.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:30 AMOn Monday I wrote at TCS Daily about it. Today, David Perlmutter has further thoughts, over at Editor and Publisher.
Perhaps it would be more reassuring if the enemy at the gates was a familiar one—politicians, or maybe radio talk show hosts. But the photojournalist standing on the crumbling ramparts of her once proud citadel now sees the vandal army charging for the sack led by “zombietime,” “The Jawa Report,” “Powerline,” “Little Green Footballs,” “confederateyankee,” and many others.In each case, these bloggers have engaged in the kind of probing, contextual, fact-based (if occasionally speculative) media criticism I have always asked of my students. And the results have been devastating: news photos and video shown to be miscaptioned, radically altered, or staged (and worse, re-staged) for the camera. Surely “green helmet guy,” “double smoke,” “the missiles that were actually flares,” “the wedding mannequin from nowhere,” the “magical burning Koran,” the “little girl who actually fell off a swing” and “keep filming!” will now enter the pantheon of shame of photojournalism.
...News picture-making media organizations have two paths of possible response to this unnerving new situation. First, they can stonewall, deny, delete, dismiss, counter-slur, or ignore the problem. To some extent, this is what is happening now and, ethical consideration aside, such a strategy is the practical equivalent of taking extra photos of the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The second, much more painful option, is to implement your ideals, the ones we still teach in journalism school. Admit mistakes right away. Correct them with as much fanfare and surface area as you devoted to the original image. Create task forces and investigating panels. Don’t delete archives but publish them along with detailed descriptions of what went wrong. Attend to your critics and diversify the sources of imagery, or better yet be brave enough to refuse to show any images of scenes in which you are being told what to show. I would even love to see special inserts or mini-documentaries on how to spot photo bias or photo fakery—in other words, be as transparent, unarrogant, and responsive as you expect those you cover to be.
I'm not sure that a simple moral crusade is going to revive the profession, though--the temptations to cheat are just too great. We are going to have to figure out some technologies (in addition to having an army of photographers--truth lies in numbers) to address the problem.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:13 AMBy Arabs:
Arabism flies in the face of historical fact. Ethnic minorities in Lebanon, as throughout the Middle East, have suffered at the hands of Arabs since the Arab-Islamic invasions in the early Muslim period. Of the efforts of Arab regimes and their ideological supporters in the West to de-legitimize regional identities other than Arab, Walid Phares, a well-known professor of Middle East studies, has written: "[The] denial of identity of millions of indigenous non-Arab nations can be equated to an organized ethnic cleansing on a politico-cultural level." This tradition of culturally suppressing minorities is the wellspring of the linguistic imperialism regnant at Middlebury's Arabic Summer School.Yet healthier models for language instruction are easy to find. In the Anglophone world, Americans, Irish, Scots, New Zealanders, Australians, Nigerians, Kenyans, and others are native English-speakers, but not English. Can anyone imagine an English language class in which students are assumed to be Anglican cricket fans who sing "Rule Britannia," post maps showing Her Majesty's empire at its pre-war height, and prefer shepherd's pie and mushy peas? Yet according to the hyper-nationalists who run Middlebury's Arabic language programs, all speakers of Arabic are Arabs--case closed.
A leading Arabic language program shouldn't imbue language instruction with political philosophy. It should instead concentrate on teaching a difficult language well--on promoting linguistic ability, not ideological conformity. Academics should never intellectualize their politics and then peddle them to students under the guise of scholarship. Those who do may force a temporary dhimmitude on their student subjects, but in the end they only marginalize their field and themselves.
This is, in some ways, even more egregious than that loon up at Wisconsin who wanted to teach 9/11 conspiracy theories in a class on Islam, because it's actually much more insidious.
[Via Jonah Goldberg, who also writes today about the Swastika and the Scimitar]
President Bush undoubtedly didn’t have any of this in mind when he dubbed our enemies in the war on terror “Islamic fascists.” But his comments — analytically flawed as they may be — added some much-needed moral clarity to our current struggle. They also helped to illuminate a much-overlooked point: Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism are historically and intellectually linked. (When the Israelis caught Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Final Solution, a leading Saudi Arabian newspaper read: “Arrest of Eichmann, who had the honor of killing 6 million Jews.”) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush’s remarks seem to have struck a nerve.Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 AM
Victor Davis Hanson writes that there is some hope amid the current gloom in the Middle East:
...all is not lost, since lunacy cuts both ways. Iran and Syria unleashed Hezbollah because they were both facing global scrutiny, one over nuclear acquisition and the other over the assassination of Lebanese reformer Rafik Hariri. Those problems won’t go away for either of them — nor, if we persist, will the democratic fervor in Afghanistan and Iraq on their borders.We still don’t know the extent of the damage that Hezbollah suffered, but it perhaps took casualties ten times the Israelis’ — losses — not to be dismissed even in the asymmetrical laws of postmodern warfare. Hezbollah’s leaders were hiding in embassies and bunkers; Israel’s were not. For all the newfound magnetism of Nasrallah, he brought ruin to his flock, and fright to the Arab establishment around Israel.
A surprised Israel now has a good glimpse of the terrorists’ new way of war, and probably next time will attack the supplier, not the launcher, of the rocketry. And when the Reuters stringers go away, the “civilians” of southern Lebanon, off-camera, might not be so eager to see more real fireworks lighting up their skies — or far-off, pristine Syria and Iran in safety praising the courage of the ruined amid the rubble. Note how Hezbollah already is desperately racing around the craters to assure its homeless constituency that it has enough Iranian cash to buy back lost sympathies.
Even the ceasefire can come back to bite the Islamists and their supporters. Hezbollah won’t be disarmed as promised, much less stay out of Katyusha range of the border. And that defiance will only reveal the impotence of the Lebanese and the U.N., reminding both that they have talked themselves into a corner and now are responsible to keep caged their own pet 7th-century vipers. This can only work to Israel’s favor when the next rockets go off, since no one then will be proposing an “international” solution — although it will be interesting to see whether Jacques Chirac talks of the “nuclear” option once his soldiers begin to be picked off by Hezbollah.
In a larger sense, the foiled London terrorist plot won’t endear either Islamists or their appeasers to millions in the world who face travel delays, cancelled flights, and body searches — on top of paying billions more to the Arab oil producers who in response whine even more in their victimhood.
Unfortunately, Melanie Phillips says that Britain's chattering classes remain fast asleep:
Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson of the Metropolitan Police described the plot as a “criminal” act which was “not about communities” but about “people who might masquerade in the community, hiding behind certain faiths.” So an act of holy war to be perpetrated in the name of Islam just happened to use that faith as a random bit of camouflage, just as it might have used Zen Buddhism, say, or Zoroastrianism?Then there’s the customary chorus that it’s all due to the war in Iraq and Britain’s poodling to America. This was also the premise of the letter last weekend by 38 Muslim groups, MPs, and peers that unless Britain altered its foreign policy it would get more terrorist outrages. This shameful threat to the nation produced a furious denunciation by the home secretary, John Reid, for proposing that terrorists should dictate British policies.
But the argument that foreign policy is the cause of the threat to Britain — a claim trotted out by a wide spectrum of people — is itself idiotic beyond measure. As Reid said, there was an al Qaeda plot in Birmingham to blow up Britain back in 2000 — before 9/11, let alone the war in Iraq. Similarly, jihadi attacks on the U.S. began 22 years before 9/11 with the Iran embassy hostage crisis in 1979, followed by two decades of further attacks.
Even now, much of Britain fails to understand the apocalyptic messianism now driving the regime in Iran to develop nuclear weapons with which to blackmail the world.
It fails to acknowledge the religious nature of this world war, with even more alarming signs of an emerging Sunni and Shia strategic alliance in Iraq and Gaza, and with al Qaeda supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon. When President Bush said we were in a war against Islamic fascism, he was merely stating a demonstrable truth.
And this remains disturbing (and what's even more disturbing is how undisturbing it is to many in power in the UK):
A recent Pew opinion poll across Europe revealed that, while Britain was the most respectful country of all towards its Muslim citizens, they repaid the compliment by hating their home country, the west and the Jews more than Muslims anywhere else. Why? The answer is inescapable. British Muslims are being radicalised by Britain itself.Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:09 AMSince Muslims whose minds are already bent by the propaganda of lies and hatred against America, Israel and the Jews pouring out of the Muslim world are further subjected by the BBC and other media outlets to daily — even hourly — diatribes about the evil of America, the evil of Israel and the fact that Britain is a patsy of evil America and evil Israel, who can possibly be surprised that untold numbers of impressionable young Muslims sign up to rid the planet of this apparent scourge?
The BBC, whose global influence is equalled only by its culpability, powerfully incites hatred by persistently misrepresenting Israel’s self-defence as unwarranted aggression, and giving air-time to an endless procession of Islamic jihadists, propagandists, anti-Western activists and bigots with rarely even a hint of a challenge.
This seems like a good idea to me. It would make it hard on spammers and netkooks, though. Then again, that's not a bug, it's another feature.
[Via Geek Press]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:21 AMThe New York Times thinks that the administration is "rewriting the Geneva Convention," when in fact it's the New York Times that is engaging in revisionism.
Mark Danziger explains the historical foolishness of the argument that it's important for us to abide by Geneva so that our enemies will. In fact, when we grant Geneva rights to people who have no rules at all, we weaken the Conventions, and strip them of meaning. There are good reasons to treat Jihadi prisoners humanely, in general, but Geneva is a very misguided and in fact counterproductive one. And as a commenter points out, it's only possible to make the argument that the Times does if one has never actually read the Conventions.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:57 AMHow is Bush doing?
Not very well, according to Gerard Baker.
...the US could take the risk of alienating the world and discarding international law only if its leadership was going to be effective. Instead its leadership has been desultory and uncertain and tragically ineffective.It tried unilateral pre-emption in Iraq, but never really had the will to see it through. So with Iran, it went all mushy and multilateralist. In Lebanon, it thought it would cover all the bases — start by aggressively supporting Israel, then go all peacenik, holding hands with the UN in a touching chorus of Kumbaya.
Now we have the worst of all worlds. Not only is the US despised around the globe, it can’t even make its supposed hegemony work.
It’s one thing to be seen as the bully in the schoolyard; it’s quite another when people realise the bully is actually incapable of getting anybody else to do what he wants. It’s unpleasant when people stop respecting you, but it’s positively terrifying when they stop fearing you.
What we have now is a situation in which the world’s only superpower, with the largest economic and military advantage any country has ever enjoyed on Earth, is pinned down like Gulliver, tormented by an army of fundamentalist Lilliputians.
While a number of people idiotically think of me as a shill for the president (simply because I'm not as deranged with hatred of him as they are), I find it hard to disagree. If he and Condi don't get on the right track, and soon, he will have a catastrophically failed presidency. Of course, that doesn't mean that I would vote for a Democrat, because that would be even worse. I still find it frightening how close John Kerry came to being president. As always, I wish we had better choices.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:15 AMIt was supposed to be a higher-than-normal hurricane season this year, but it's actually below normal, so far. And of course, some ignorant prognosticators even claimed that it was going to be higher than normal (and that way in the future) due to global warming. Roy Spencer explains both why this is nonsense, and why atmosphere and ocean modelers should be a little more humble.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:06 AMIn the midst of all the news in the Middle East, North Korea may be getting ready for an underground nuclear test. Here's hoping for a dud (though it would be hard for us to know if they failed).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:29 PMLileks, on the absurd theatre that is the United Nations:
...the West struck a deal with Hezbollah and its paymasters, and it was regarded as a positive development. Peace in our time, and all that.It's a wonder they didn't pass out tiny collectible umbrellas from the Franklin Mint "Neville Chamberlain Collection" to solemnize the event.
The cease-fire resolution wasn't surprising; the United Nations may have created Israel, but it's been apologizing ever since. Nevertheless, let no one assert the document lacks teeth. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it: "This resolution has an arms embargo within it, and a responsibility of the Lebanese government to make sure that illegal arms are not coming into their country."
Yes, that'll work. You can well imagine the frosty reception that awaits an Iranian general who tells the mullahs he's found a way to slip new rockets into Lebanon:
"We will smuggle in the parts under the guise of providing reconstruction machinery; if satellites detect the tell-tale profile of the rockets, we will simply point to the damage suffered by the Lebanese Space Agency. Then we tattoo assembly instructions on small children and send them via diplomatic pouch. When the parts are in place -- why are you looking at me that way?"
The mullahs look at one another, and one finally speaks.
"General, perhaps you were unaware of this fact, but all parties have agreed to disarm Hezbollah. Assurances were made to Ms. Rice. Do you understand? Assurances. Now rip up your mad schemes, return to base, and think no more of perfidious things."
I think he's being sarcastic again.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:02 PMSome scary reading over at Technology Review, on the democratization of high-tech weaponry. As technology continues to advance, and things like this get cheaper, asymmetric warfare is going to become ever harder to wage. At some point, when fighting an enemy that worships and revels in death, we may have no choice except to give him what he wants, wholesale.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 AMA lot of Hollywood stars have actually publicly condemned Hezbollah and Hamas.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:29 PMRamesh Ponnuru asks an interesting question:
...what's the best term to refer both to agnostics and atheists? "Faithless" seems too negative, "bright" too propagandistic. Do agnostics and atheists consider "unbeliever" better than "non-believer," or vice-versa? When I was agnostic, I didn't take my own unbelief seriously enough to consider this question.
I've never given much thought to the matter, but if one insists on lumping both into the same category, I'd say that "non-theists" seems both accurate and non-pejorative (other than to those to whom not believing in God is an intrinsically bad thing...).
But I think that the distinction between atheists and skeptics is important. The former (based on my experience with them) are as devout, or (actually) more devout, than most theists. They fervently believe (unprovably) that there is no God, and will proselytize endlessly to convert others to their belief. I have no belief, one way or the other, and it would never occur to me to (futilely) attempt to persuade a believer, of either faith, one way or the other.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:17 PM...continue to be more clearly drawn. From the Guardian:
The Salafist movement was under-rated and misunderstood and the reaction to it has been confused. As always, the right is triggerhappy and hostile to free expression; as always, the left never wants to do anything that would hazard its self-righteous sense of moral purity.Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:55 PMThese are historic fault lines. The right tolerated fascism in the thirties, the left Soviet Communism in the fifties. Of course these two earlier totalitarian movements were different in nature and our response when it came was not always well judged - the tendency is to think first of the excesses of the right typified by the witch hunts of the odious McCarthy, but we should remember, too, that the Democratic party in the immediate postwar years of Henry Wallace would have abandoned Europe just as the left in the eighties would have left Europe at the mercy of the new Soviet missiles.
The apologists for the Islamo-fascists - an accurate term - leave millions around the world exposed to a less obvious but more insidious barbarism.
Nelson Ascher writes about anti-semitism by proxie, and the Jihadis' real agenda:
The Nazis managed to convince millions and millions of Frenchmen and Poles, Belgians, Norwegians etc. and, yes, Brits and Americans that, since they were fighting a common enemy, the Jews, they weren’t really the mortal enemies of France and Poland and Belgium and Norway and England and the US. Untold millions were eager to believe that Germany wasn’t really threatening them and their countries, that the Germans didn’t really want to conquer, exploit and kill them. Why? Because they either thought that they could make a common cause with the Nazis against the Jews, or remained indifferent, neutral and defenseless because, being indifferent to the fate of the Jews, they believed it was none of their problem. Many of them even turned against those in their own countries who wanted to fight the Nazis and blamed them for putting everyone else in danger just to “protect the Jews”.Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:56 AMIn short: if the Jews were used in the beginning as scapegoats, their main use throughout the war was as a tool to “divide and conquer”. Thanks to their sincere or opportunistic ant-Semitism the Germans were able to paralyse important forces in the countries and societies they wanted to defeat and submit.
That’s just what is happening once again before our very eyes. Though the Jihadists have their own clear, even megalomaniac goals, and while they kill thousands in the US or fight for Shari’a in Europe, while they complain about East Timor or fight for Kashmir, it is enough for them to involve the Jews, particularly Israel, in their struggle or their declared agenda to get the active support or at least the indifference of those in Europe, the US and elsewhere who would like to believe that their complaints, grievances and goals are restricted to or only motivated by Israel. Of course, they also declare they’re fighting against America, but then, for those who hate America anyway (and often the Jews and/or Israel too), the same logic works perfectly.
...on Ray Kurzweil. Derek Lowe is optimistic, but not that optimistic:
I agree that we can overcome the major diseases. I really do expect to put cancer, heart disease, the major infections, and the degenerative disorders in their place. But do I expect to do it by 20-flipping-19? No. I do not. I should not like to be forced to put a date on when I think we'll have taken care of the diseases that are responsible for 95% of the mortality in the industrialized world. But I am willing to bet against it happening by 2019, and I will seriously entertain offers from anyone willing to take the other side of that bet.
I hope (as I suspect he does as well) that he's wrong, but fear he's right. Still have to exercise and watch the diet. On the other hand, I do think we've already made pretty good strides on this front, and they may be sufficient to keep me going until whatever date needed.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:55 AMThe book Debunking 9/11 Myths, has its own blog. Lileks reviewed it himself the other day:
I read the entire book. Sane, logical, unemotional, sensible, comprehensive. There: I’m now officially part of the conspiracy. My membership card should arrive in two weeks. I understand we get 10% off at Denny’s.
Yeah, I wish. I haven't had the time to read it yet.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:48 AMHezbollah says they might withdraw as long as the Lebanese army doesn't mess with their stuff while they're gone:
Hezbollah indicated it would be willing to pull back its fighters and weapons in exchange for a promise from the army not to probe too carefully for underground bunkers and weapons caches, the officials said.
Amazing.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:58 AMProperty prices are rising fast in Eastern Europe according to Financial Times:
...property prices in Riga, the Latvian capital, surged by 45.3% in the year to June, following on from a rise of 73.5% in the preceding year, with growth also buoyant in Bulgaria and Estonia. Mr. Bailey [head of residential research at Knight Frank] attributed this to a "levelling up" of prices across Europe, particularly in the former eastern bloc nations that have joined the European Union. "Wage inflation, growing prosperity and access to less constrained mortgage finance have all contributed to rapidly rising prices," he said.
The same transformation could occur wherever property rights are dim and mortgage rates are high. I am thinking of Jamaica, Lebanon, Mexico, Iraq and many, many other places around the globe. Dollarize (or Euro-ize) the economy, offer subsidized mortgages, low property and capital gains taxes for houses, no rent control and put home improvement shows on TV and we will have a global home boom. These are sitting assets that can be taxed and repossessed. They create a home ownership culture, security of a locked door and a place to hang mosquito netting. $30,000 of cinder block housing for every 4th person on the globe would be $45T. This is the head end of the promise of capitalism with liquid lending.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 08:19 PMHey, everybody's got to be good at something:
A number of people have more than 500 arrests in the city of 226,000 people. The record was held by Edward Rooks, who died in 2004, with 652 arrests.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:47 PM
...and probably even get well paid for it, in an influential publication, if I didn't want to lose my job. Unfortunately, it wouldn't pay that well...
Proposition (with which I don't necessarily agree):
NASA's approach, a return to Apollo (both in terms of the "we need to set a goal and get there," and the actual hardware concepts) represents the mindset of a cargo cult.
As Rusty Barton noted over at sci.space.policy, in response to this story, "When Boeing started designing the 787, did its engineers go to the Udvar-Hazy Museum and start pulling parts off the Dash-80?"
Discuss.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:00 PMOK, my question to Dr. Stanley is, if it's a good idea for Mars, why isn't it a good idea for the moon?
"If you refilled the EDS in orbit [using commercial LEO fuel depots] it could act as the MTV," says Georgia Institute of Technology aerospace professor Douglas Stanley, manager of the November 2005 NASA exploration systems architecture study (ESAS).Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:39 PM
Missed the Darwin Award by this much:
His girlfriend said Spangler decided to duct tape the large firework to the old football helmet. He then put on the helmet and ignited it.Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:13 PM
I think people tend to draw far too many generalizations on the basis of far too few examples in the launch business.
There is a long essay to be written on this subject.
I agree with this as well:
Ironically, most SpaceX personnel come from Boeing, Northrop and other space companies. It is the sometimes Dilbertian environment, not the individual engineers, that holds those organizations back.Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:36 AM
Norman Podhoretz, in a long essay, asks and answers the question.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:39 PM
Can't wait to extrapolate to this decade (aka, "The Naughties"...
[Via an emailer--if anyone knows to whom to credit it, let me know]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:15 PMDon Boudreaux says that we need to ignore global warming:
Those of us who recognize these important benefits of capitalism -- those of us who understand that capitalism's true greatness lies not (as many critics insinuate) in producing oceans of pointless trinkets and baubles but in making the lives of ordinary people richer and fuller and longer -- are reluctant to yield power to governments to tackle global warming. We worry that this power will kill the goose that's laying this golden egg.If you think that such a worry is exaggerated, recall the language Al Gore used in his book "Earth in the Balance." The former Vice President asserted that we are suffering an "environmental crisis" that can be avoided only if we "drastically change our civilization and our way of thinking."
"Drastically change our civilization." Hmmm. This sounds like a call to significantly scale back markets, trade and industrial activities in order to lessen humankind's "footprint" on the Earth and its environment. We can, no doubt, make our environmental footprint smaller -- but how great a benefit will this achievement be if it returns us to the ages-old condition of high mortality and morbidity?
I wasn't sure whether to file this under "Science And Society," or "Economics." Had to go with the latter (particularly since so much of the global warming debate is entirely devoid of this topic).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:06 AMBut pretty amusing. Cliches from alt.s3x.stories.
Blond goddesses with gigantic breasts and gorgeous bodies are all secretly in love with nerdy computer geeks, and their ambition is to move into the apartment next door to a computer geek.The Superbowl is every wife's big chance to finally get to f**k 2-4 of her husband's closest friends, and these friends are always attractive.
There are several Trek-s3x-related ones as well:
Odo quite simply IS the best f**k in the galaxy (he's a shape shifter, do the math).Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:54 AM
A long, but must-read piece, particularly for the White House, which seems to be going wobbly (I have to say that I've been extremely unimpressed with Dr. Rice for the last few months).
President Bush set out a series of policy changes from the weeks after 9/11 to his second Inaugural in 2005. Threats would be confronted before they arrive, the sponsors of terror would be held equally accountable for terrorist murders and America would promote democracy as an alternative to Islamic fascism, the exploitation of religion to impose a violent political utopia. Every element of the Bush doctrine was directed toward a vision: a reformed Middle East that joins the world instead of resenting and assaulting it.That vision has been tested on nearly every front, by Katyusha rockets in Haifa, car bombs in Baghdad and a crackdown on dissent in Cairo. Condoleezza Rice calls this the "birth pangs" of a new Middle East, and it is a complicated birth. As this violent global conflict proceeds, and its length and costs become more obvious, Americans should keep a few things in mind.
First, the nation may be tired, but history doesn't care. It is not fair that the challenge of Iran is rising with Iraq, bloody and unresolved. But, as President Kennedy used to say, "Life is not fair."
...In foreign-policy circles, it is sometimes claimed that past nuclear proliferation—say, to India or Pakistan—has been less destabilizing than predicted. In the case of Iran, this is wishful thinking. A nuclear Iran would mean a nuclear Middle East, as traditional rivals like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey feel pressured to join the club, giving every regional conflict nuclear overtones. A nuclear Iran would also give terrorist groups something they have previously lacked and desperately want: a great-power sponsor. Over time, this is the surest way to put catastrophic technology into the hands of a murderous few. All options have dangers and drawbacks. But inaction might bring the harshest verdict of history: they knew much, and they did nothing.
Bill Quick has further thoughts.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:56 AMI've never read anything by "Vox Day" before, but one of my commenters cited him in a previous post. But having read this, it makes it pretty hard to take anything he (or she) has to say seriously:
I tend to support the faked Moon landing theory myself, not because of any particular detail, but simply based on the theory that if the Official Story is that we landed there, then we probably didn't.
Note, that's the only reason stated for disbelief--pure contrarianism. Never mind that it would have been much more difficult to fake it than to actually do it, and that all of the supposed "anomalies" or "proofs" that we didn't go are readily explained by simple references to actual physics and facts.
I should also add that the Fox Network (which is not the same thing as Fox News) should be eternally ashamed of itself for broadcasting that travesty of a crockumentary on the subject a few years ago, and feeding the loons who believe this stuff.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:48 AMI know a lot about solar power and trust me, space solar power is not a good option.
Elon Musk, Aug 3, 2006
When Caltech looked at the sailboat that lost the America's Cup, they found that it had less drag being dragged backwards than forwards.
The case for beaming solar power to Earth is bad. So bad that it actually works better to beam from Earth to space.
A coal plant costs about $0.75/watt peak capacity ($1B for a 750MW plant), plus $0.07/Watt Year (Wy) in coal to run all the time. Space solar costs about $202.5/watt. Let's make the heroic assumption that we can build and launch 100,000 kg satellites. If we need a team of 12 people earning $15 an hour to take care of the satellite ground operations ongoing, then we can keep the $360k in wages to $0.07/Wy.
What about $100/kg launch costs (1% of now) $0.025 manufacturing costs (1% of now) where we can expect the floor of orbital transport prices to be for decades because that is 10% of the price of the existing suborbital flights that have $10 million in deposits. Surely at $10,000 to orbit, there would be enough takers to sell out capacity until a major construction push on orbital launch capacity was made. At $2.025/watt, and 10% interest, coal prices would still need to triple to make the math work. That is, we need a factor of 300 through some combination of lower launch and manufacturing costs, watts/kg, coal taxes or emissions credits.
On the other hand, we get about 8% energy efficiency sending power from the Earth to the Moon. That translates to $1.80/Wy for Earth power on the Moon vs. $20.32/Wy for solar (at the pole!). Add $175/w for lasers and $313/w for mirrors (or about $100 million for four 2.5 meter mirrors and 8 2.4 kW lasers), then we can increase comm. sat. launch payload by 50% to save a good fraction of $1 billion per year in launch costs and billions more by having longer lived satellites and lower insurance costs. In the mean time, we can run satellites whose batteries have gone down or whose solar panels never fully deployed for longer and with more function ($500 million/year estimated value).
So shoot the energy into space to colonize space and the Moon. When the prices for space manufacturing come down to Earth, then we can talk about space solar.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 08:26 AMI think I see a candidate for president in '08 that the "netroots" could really get behind. Hugh Hewitt talks about their latest hearthrob:
"Even before the translation could be heard, I felt more assured of his intelligence and comprehension than I've ever felt about Bush speaking in mangled English. He's a very savvy politician, to be sure."And
"He is smart and is also media savvy or surrounded by people that are, as shown by the wardrobe, the mannerisms and likely even the pitch and tone of his chosen translator."
And
"He certainly has some of the same comments and questions of bush that we do. He raised many good points."
Plus, he's all for destroying the Zionist Entity! What's not to love?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:48 AMWith the Middle East seemingly on a rolling boil right now, Taylor Dinerman has a new review of Bob Zubrin's 2003 satire The Holy Land. I briefly reviewed it myself a couple years ago, and it sadly remains very topical today.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:59 AMSarah Baxter, on the moral and intellectual confusion of the "anti-war" left (both "feminist" and otherwise).
The peace movement lost a foe in Reagan but has gone on to find new friends in today’s Stop the War movement. Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.”Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:45 AMFor Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that “feminism” is the one “ism” she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: “What you’re seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.”
As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews.
On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of “I am woman, hear me roar”, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush — “the world’s number one terrorist” as the marchers would have it.
Jon Goff has some interesting thoughts. I agree, for the most part. If Florida wants to continue to play in the game (at least for commercial vehicles), it has to realize that it no longer has the intrinsic geographical advantage that it's thought it did for years. This is an issue that is going to take a lot of work with AST to sell, though, particularly for orbital flights.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 AMMy thoughts on the latest Reuters scandal (at least "Routers" has never used fake pics...) over at TCS Daily, and what it may mean for the future of press photography.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:04 AMIf this report is true, it seems monumentally stupid on Syria's part (not that there's anything improbable, or wrong with that). In fact, it seems like a golden opportunity for Israel to salvage some face from what is so far (relative to Arab expectations) a disaster.
Israel could take out Syria's tanks with a trivial effort, and no losses whatsoever. If they think that they're somehow going to get the Golan back in this little imbroglio, Baby Assad (or whoever is really running the country) is even dumber than he looks.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:42 PMFaye Flam wonders if we really got it on with Neanderthals. But what's really funny is the Freeper thread about the story (warning--not work safe--Helen Thomas photoshops involved).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:32 PMIt's the bottom of the eighth, and the Tigers are about to get swept by the White Sox unless they can pick up at least three runs in the ninth. That would put Chicago only five and a half games back, with plenty of time to keep moving up. I hope this isn't the beginning of a collapse.
[A couple minutes later]
Dang, Chicago picked up another run before the end of the inning. Now Detroit needs four in the ninth to just stay alive. The way they've been batting lately, it doesn't look good.
[A few minutes later]
Whoa! One out and two men on from consecutive singles, with the tying run on deck. Can they pull it out? Probably not, but it's frustrating when they get your hopes up like this.
[Update]
Dang, two outs now, with two on first and second.
...
And there's the third out.
They're going to have to play better ball than that if they want to hang on to the division (and major league) lead.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:17 PMThe Berlin Wall was erected forty five years ago today. And it's been sixty-six years since the beginning of the Battle of Britain.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:15 PMMinette Marrin writes about Britain's disastrous multi-culti policy fashion, and its resulting tragic failure to assimilate its immigrants:
Today, in the borough of Southwark as a whole, about a third of the entire population comes from a black or ethnic minority “community”, as official figures so tendentiously put it, when the problem is precisely the lack of community. “More than 100 languages are spoken in our schools and 43% of our pupils speak English as an additional language,” says the council.Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:01 PMThis shows, as the council says, a rich diversity and for many years in this country we have been required by the progressive establishment to celebrate this diversity. Yet such extreme diversity is quite obviously at odds with community. It is at odds with the development of shared culture and shared purpose, of shared language in shared school rooms and the creation of the ties that bind a community together.
To throw together such a hugely various collection of people from all over the world, in such numbers, from all kinds of different cultures speaking different languages, is to create a miserable, murderous Tower of Babel. So it has proved in Southwark and in other places like it. The result is racial tension of all kinds, bullying, crime and fear.
If you wanted to invent a way of demoralising people and setting them against each other in their deprivation, you could hardly have come up with anything better, short of bombing them. The ties of community are fragile; they are hard to weave but easy to break; they can’t be drawn together by wishful thinking.
Community needs a critical mass of familiarity, shared language, shared tradition and shared moral attitudes. A strong community can accept outsiders and is often enriched by them, as ours has been, but it also needs a high degree of common purpose and common culture. That might seem blindingly obvious, yet immigration policy has been based on a determined refusal to admit the obvious.
I'm not sure what this means, but I think that Fidel is telling us that he's kicked the bucket. Too bad it couldn't have happened a lot sooner.
One of the down sides of life extension is that creatures like this will avail themselves of it, too.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:32 PMAri Shavit asks what happened to Israel, and answers:
Generally it is not right to conduct an in-depth investigation of a wartime failure during a war. However, at the end of the most embarrassing year of Israeli defense since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Israeli government is not drawing conclusions. It is not reorganizing the system, there is no evidence of a real learning curve and it is not radiating a new ethos. On the contrary: It is adding another layer of folly onto a previous one. Its slowness to react is dangerous. Its caution is a recipe for disaster. Its attempt to prevent bloodshed is costing a great deal of bloodshed. So that now of all times, just when the forces are moving toward south Lebanon, there is no escaping the question of where we went wrong. It is so that Israel will be able to achieve a last-minute victory and so that the troops will be able to achieve their goals and so the soldiers will be able to return home safely, that we must ask already now: What happened to us? What the hell happened to us?A simple thing happened: We were drugged by political correctness. The political correctness that has come to dominate Israeli discourse and Israeli awareness in the past generation was totally divorced from the Israeli situation. It did not have the tools to deal with the reality of an existential conflict. It did not have the tools to deal with a reality of an inter-religious and inter-cultural conflict. That is why it focused entirely on the Palestinian issue. It made the baseless assumption that the occupation is the source of evil. It assumed that it is the occupation that is preventing peace and causing unrest and perpetuating the instability.
I think that the Israeli left finally gets it. Sadly, there's no sign that their compatriots in Europe, the US and Canada do. Whether or not Olmert survives this debacle will help tell the tale. Fortunately, the Lebanese cabinet is in disarray, and the attempted hudna is breaking down, so Israel may yet get a chance to continue to remove the Iranian infection that is killing Lebanon, and preventing peace.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:28 PMApparently, the last Shuttle flight had more foam damage than they thought. It was actually about average. They should keep flying, though. Or shut it down. Stop wasting money and time trying to fix the foam problem.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:13 AMApparently, the two young men (of whose religion we may not speak) with the untraceable cell phone collection in my home state, were planning to blow up the bridge. It's certainly the most compelling target in the state, particularly given on what hard times downtown Detroit has fallen.
Still, the Ambassador or Bluewater bridges would have been much more convenient. Hey, here's an idea--they could blow up the Windsor Tunnel and flood Detroit! With any justice (and a lot of luck), they could submerge Dearborn itself. To heck with those pesky laws of physics.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:27 AMThe People's Cube says that this latest escapade in Lebanon isn't the first time that those high-strung Jews have overreacted:
In 1943, Europe itself suffered from a similar Jewish overreaction to some controversial German policies, in an event known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Zionist radicals attacked the National Socialist German Workers Party that was loved by the German people for its far-reaching educational and social welfare services. In fact, many academics who teach Peace Studies at prestigious universities believe that it was the Zionists' "disproportionate use of force" that had ruined hopes for peace in Europe and caused a humanitarian crisis that could have easily be avoided if only Jews had shown restraint and tolerance towards the democratically elected German government.
Brilliant.
And here's a related post off the same link--a report from Germany by what appears to be Kevins Sites' grandfather.
I wonder if I could dig up an old interview by Mike Wallace with Hitler, in which Mr. Wallace told us how reasonable, rational and serious he seemed? All they wanted was Lebensraum, after all.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:09 AMThe Perseids peaked last night, but you should still be able to see them tonight if you get out of the city. Unfortunately, the moon is still bright.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:24 PMA long piece by Robert Tracinski on the inevitability of war:
We can't avoid this war, because Iran won't let us avoid it. That is the real analogy to the 1930s. Hitler came to power espousing the goal of German world domination, openly promising to conquer neighboring nations through military force and to persecute and murder Europe's Jews. He predicted that the free nations of the world would be too weak—too morally weak—to stand up to him, and European and American leaders spent the 1930s reinforcing that impression. So Hitler kept advancing—the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the Spanish bombing campaign in 1937, the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the invasion of Poland in 1939—until the West finally, belated decided there was no alternative but war.That is what is playing out today. Iran's theocracy has chosen, as the nation's new president, a religious fanatic who believes in the impending, apocalyptic triumph of Islam over the infidels. He openly proclaims his desire to create an Iranian-led Axis that will unite the Middle East in the battle against America, and he proclaims his desire to "wipe Israel off the map," telling an audience of Muslim leaders that "the main solution" to the conflict in Lebanon is "the elimination of the Zionist regime." (Perhaps this would be better translated as Ahmadinejad's "final solution" to the problem of Israel.)
Like Hitler, Ahmadinejad regards the free nations of the world as fading "sunset" powers, too morally weak to resist his legions of Muslim fanatics. And when we hesitate to kill Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, when we pressure Israel to rein in its attacks on Hezbollah, when we pander to the anti-Jewish bigotry of the "Muslim street"—we reinforce his impression of our weakness.
The result has been and will be the same: Iran will press its advantage and continue to attack our interests in the Middle East and beyond. The only question is when we will finally decide that Iran's aggression has gone too far and its theocratic regime needs to be destroyed.
And here's an apt description of some recent commenters here:
The larger evasion is this: the left senses that a regional war is coming, that Iran is hell-bent on starting it, and that there is no way to avoid it. But all of this runs directly counter to their whole world-view. Rather than questioning that world view, they simply assert that this can't be happening. They have to believe that something, anything—no matter how implausible—will stop it from happening. If we just get everyone together and talk, and we keep tinkering with diplomatic solutions until we find something that works, surely we can find a way to avoid a regional war in the Middle East. Can't we? Please?And so the left confirms the right's sense that the appeasement of the 1930s is the best historical precedent for the current era.
Depressing, but necessary reading.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:33 AMI just got a review copy of the book "Debunking 9/11 Myths," which is a book version of the in-depth investigation that Popular Mechanics did. It's in a similar format to Snopes, with a "Claim" (the myth), then a "Fact," in which the evidence and physics are brought to bear to debunk it. It looks like an interesting book, from an engineering standpoint. What the book doesn't explain, of course, is why (besides Bush derangement) people buy into these nutty conspiracy theories. I hope that PM sends a copy to Cynthia McKinney, though she doesn't seem like the type that reads books, particularly factual ones.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:37 AM...of killing children.
"It is our love of these innocents that endangers them. If we did not care if children died, they would be in little danger."Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:42 AM"That cannot be," she replies in anger.
"But it is so," I contest. "If we did not care if our children died, they would not be targets. There would be no reason to target them, because we would not be moved by their deaths.
"If we did not care if their children died," I add, "there would be no reason to clutter military emplacements with their presence. If it were not that we are horrified by the deaths of children, the enemy's children would be clear of all places of battle -- because they are, except for the fact that we love them, a hindrance."
She bites her lip.
"Of course, we cannot cut out our hearts," I tell her. "Nor should we -- as we wish to remain men, and good men, rather than monsters. Yet it is our love that is the chief danger to the innocent now -- to our own innocents, and theirs also."
Here's a pretty spectacular Darwin Award finalist--a man who took a sledgehammer to a grenade. No apparent big loss, but sadly, he badly injured a co-worker as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:28 AMI hate that stupid commercial for the oil and natural gas industry, in which a bunch of people say "Tell me about this, tell me about that, tell me the truth." It makes them sound like idiots. It also makes whoever came up with the ad sound like idiots. I don't expect an industry to tell me things--I expect an industry to provide me with what I need at an affordable price.
What is the point?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:10 AMGerard Baker says that it's counterproductive to blame ourselves:
Events such as yesterday’s near-miss should remind us that September 11, 2001, gave birth to a radical and dangerous new world. It required the US — an imperfect country to be sure, but the only one with the power and the will to defend the basic freedoms we too easily take for granted — with its allies to remake the international system. It provided a terrifying harbinger of much larger atrocities to come, when terrorists and their state supporters get hold of weapons with which they can kill millions, not thousands. This new enemy is not like old enemies. It is fundamentalist and suicidal and apocalyptic. The old system, rooted in a liberal philosophy that relied on patient diplomacy and made a virtue of being slow to respond to attacks, was unequal to this new challenge. The new system required rapid action to open up the Middle East, the festering root of all these threats to modernity.Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:44 AMI will grant you that the Iraq war has been characterised, in conception and execution, by blunder after blunder. And it is certainly possible that, in their failures there, the US and Britain have made the world more unstable, not less. But we should not, in our frustration, confuse the real enemies here. We should not mistake the unlooked-for dangers caused by blunders and arrogance in Washington for the targeted threats posed by nihilism and hatred in much of the Middle East, and in some of our own cities.
...the terrorists are having a major impact on our society. There have been enough successful attacks (9/11, London, and Madrid to name the most obvious) that each foiled attack still heightens the public fear level, causing a predictable government overreaction. Today's news will certainly cost us a little more freedom and a lot more treasure.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:48 AMIt became a standing joke in the months after 9/11 attacks that, if we did not continue some trivial activity, "Then the terrorists have won." Sadly, it's no joke.
Bridget Johnson has the most shallow analysis of the Mideast war ever.
I like it, though.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:27 PMI'm glad that the President has finally stopped calling this a War on Terror, and is now identifying the enemy. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Keith Burgess-Jackson that "Islamofascism" is the wrong term:
Why would President Bush use “fascist” to describe such an ideology? I honestly don’t know. The only thing I can think of is that “fascist,” like “communist,” has negative emotive meaning. It’s an all-purpose term of abuse. To call something fascist is primarily to condemn it—that’s President Bush’s goal—and only secondarily to describe it. (This is why Brian Leiter and other leftists call President Bush a fascist. It’s pure abuse, with little or no cognitive content.) The best term to describe the people President Bush has in mind is “Islamists.” A Muslim is an adherent of Islam, which is a religion. Islamism is not a religion; it is a political morality (note the “ism”) and a set of doctrines about permissible means of social change. (Terrorism is one such means.) Those who subscribe to it are Islamists. All Islamists are Muslims, but not all Muslims are Islamists. Islamism competes not with Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism but with liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, anarchism, and socialism. See here for more on this important distinction.
But it is obviously another form of totalitarianism, just as we fought in the last two world wars.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:17 PM...to learn that Moonbat McKinney's supporters are blaming the usual suspects for her election loss.
Oy.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:19 PMTwo, actually. Voicemail systems for credit cards that insist you use voice, and don't offer a keypad option.
But this one also bugged me. After giving me the confirmation number, it asks "Can I repeat that for you?"
The answer is obviously "yes," and never going to be "no," but that obvious grammatical logic would put me in an infinite loop. It irks me as a pedant. I wish it would ask instead "should I repeat that for you?" If it were a human, I would joke with it, saying, of course you can, but you don't need to. But with a machine, it's simply irritating.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:32 PMScott Ott is asking the question that's surely on everyone's mind.
[Update in the evening]
Michael Clarke explains the weird fascination between Jihadis and aircraft.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:48 AMMartin Bright says that "the left" can take a few lessons from "the right":
...the Foreign Office seems determined to press ahead with courting radical Islamists. Just this month, the British government paid for Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey to discuss the future of European Islam. At home, it funded two Islamist youth organisations, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and Young Muslim Organisation, to help run a roadshow of Muslim scholars to tour the country. Fosis and YMO, while condemning violence, are ideological allies of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami. It is ironic that conservative thinkers categorise these organisations accurately as part of an Islamist extreme right, while many on the left continue, wrongly, to see them as part of some wider international Muslim liberation movement.While this situation remains, there is no shame for those on the left opposed to the rise of radical Islam to build alliances with conservatives prepared to call fascism by its real name.
Yes. Like (finally) George Bush.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:46 AMTwo days after my prediction that the Israelis would move north to the Litani River in Lebanon, they are doing it.
The Israelis see the "300-500" soldiers lives that will be lost in the exchange as worth the cost of the border security. Hezbollah says that Southern Lebanon will be a "graveyard".
I disagree with Jacque Chirac who says that allowing continued hostilities "would mean the most immoral result". It is immoral to demand status quo ante borders that are indefensible and an invitation to future hostilities and extra deaths on both sides of the Litani. Expect the second half of my prediction, a wall, to be built as soon as hostilities die down.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:44 AMThe new security procedures mean that the airlines are going to have to provide a lot more water, if you're not allowed to bring your own.
[Update a little later, with a few more thoughts]
Women are going to get hit harder by this than men. They're more likely to want to take their special liquids (shampoos, conditioners, etc.) that won't necessarily be purchasable at the destination, in a carry on for a short trip. For the men, standard shampoo and toothpaste will be purchasable at the other end.
I predict that this is going to mean a lot more checked baggage. I wonder if they'll be able to handle it?
I also think that as it gets more and more of a PITA to fly, at some point people are going to rebel, and demand that we adopt the Israeli approach--to start looking for terrorists, instead of weapons. Now that Mineta's gone, the opposition to profiling may be reduced. It will be interesting in light of the Hamdan decision what the Supreme Court will have to say about it if it occurs and (as will be inevitable from the CAIR lawsuits) it hears a case.
Oh, and did you notice Bush's speech today? He didn't say we're at war with terror. He said we're at war with "Islamic fascists." That's a big improvement.
[Evening update]
I think that the new airline security policies are idiotic. I'll explain why in a TCSDaily column. Probably Monday.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:52 AMJeff Foust has a podcast up of Mike Griffin's speech and Q&A from last week's Mar Society Meeting.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:54 AMWhy is America waiting to be attacked by Tehran?
What is the explanation for America's willful fiction that the United Nations Security Council can engineer an accommodation in Lebanon, when it is vivid to every member state that this is a replay of September 1938, when Europe fed Hitler the Sudetenland as the U.N. now wants to feed the jihadists the sovereignty of Israel?
As the author points out, as is often the case, we won't start this war, but as usual, we'll have to finish it.
[Update]
Listening to Sky News describing British Muslims who claim that they are Muslims first, and British citizens second. Sounds like it's time to deport some folks.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:21 AMThe world is going to end in less than two weeks. Well, at least if Islamist nutballs have anything to say about it. I was going to put this down as war commentary, but I think I'll stick to "Weird."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:36 PMI cannot use my Windows 2000 desktop machine. (Almost) every time I boot it, it refuses to recognize the mouse. I say "almost" because once in a while it does. When it does, I use it, and hope that I won't have to reboot again. It seems to be random, but it doesn't work much more often than it does. Can anyone imagine what causes this behavior?
I'm writing this from my Fedora machine (which is on the same KVM switch as the Windows machine, and using the same mouse, with no problems). Fortunately, I finished up my work for the client, that required MS Word, before I had to reboot (I was installing a flurry of Windows security updates...)
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, the sixth time was the charm. Oh, did I mention that part of the ritual is making vigorous mouse motions during boot to get it to work (this seems to be a necessary, but not sufficient condition).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:05 PMJames Van Allen, discoverer of the magnetic belts surrounding the earth that bear his name, has died. He was one of the most (perhaps the most) notable long-time opponents of the manned space program. He never understood that civil space is about much more than science.
Condolences to his family. It is a loss to science, if not informed space policy debate.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:44 AMIf I had more time, I'd have more to write about the noble creatures who are concerned that we might interfere with continuing dictatorship in Cuba. As it is, I can only laugh. While crying.
By the way, while I'm sure that this crowd will profoundly mourn it if true, I think that the monster is probably pushing up palm trees.
And to my current leftist trolls, was that an "unlibertarian" thought?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:16 PMBedbugs. They're baaaaccckkk.
It's funny, you always hear that expression, "don't let the bedbugs bite," but you never actually associate it with the very real phenomenon that spurred it, if you've never experienced it. And it may mean that we have to rethink the balance between comfort and perceived threats to health from pesticides. Of course, it's nothing compared to the holocaust caused by the banning of DDT. Thanks, Rachel!
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:05 PMDid anyone call WWII WWII during WWII? Or was it only called that in retrospect? If not, what did they call it?
Would it make sense to simply rename the Cold War WWIII and call this one WWIV, so we can get away from this stupid "War On Terror" name?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:35 PMPeace in Lebanon requires all belligerents to agree.
It requires Hezbollah ceasing fire which they say is contingent on:
1. Israel ceding Syrian-claimed Shebaa Farms near the Golan Heights
2. Israel leaving before Hezbollah agreeing
3. An exchange of the captured soldiers for prisoners
Israel ceasing fire which they say requires:
1. Rocket attacks have to stop and a strong international force come in before Israel leaving
2. Kidnapped soldiers must be returned before cease fire
For an international force to come in:
1. There must be an agreement before coming in
2. There must be a cease fire before coming in
3. There must be a willing country to do the deployment
There are other actors that have other things to do such as Syria, Iran, US, Russia and China among others.
These are logically inconsistent and quite unlikely even if the basic inconsistencies get resolved by some miracle. I get a gestalt from the reporting that peace is just a matter of putting more pressure on the parties and that it is a minor issue that divides them. The logical fallacy is that we have a number of unlikely events that must all happen for peace to be achieved and pundits are treating the chain as strong as the strongest link: that Israel and Hezbollah both agree that a prisoner exchange would be a good idea.
My prediction is that we will have no partnership, no peace and that Israel will re-occupy Lebanon north to the Litani River, there will be a new wall, and Hezbollah will be envigorated to continue killing Israeli soldiers at the rate of 50-100/year which was the pre-2000 level. Israel will accept this as a trade vital to keeping Northern Israel free of short range rockets and unacceptable levels of civilian deaths. Lebanon will be a war zone until Hezbollah is beaten by some other force in the rest of Lebanon.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 09:46 AMBoth Iraq and Lebanon resulted from the UN being either unable, or unwilling, to enforce its own resolutions. But it's easier to blame it on the Jews and the Amerikkkan imperialists.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 AMDwayne Day has a review of a new documentary on the Mars movement starring (for better or worse), Bob Zubrin:
One of Zubrin’s public speaking weaknesses is his inability to hide his contempt for anybody who disagrees with him. Most of his verbal ticks don’t come through in the documentary, but his contempt for NASA and those who question his philosophy and technical ideas do rise to the surface at times. A polite way to say it is that he does not suffer fools gladly, except that Zubrin obviously considers the population of fools to be very large. Like many very intelligent people who are passionate about their ideas, he exhibits little patience for those who do not simply take his word that something is possible and want to check his math and maybe his chemistry as well.But to give him credit, Zubrin’s passion, intelligence, and cleverness are also in evidence in the film. Zubrin’s Mars Direct proposal was adopted by a study team at Johnson Space Center where it was modified to become “Mars Semi-Direct” and incorporated into NASA’s Mars Design Reference Mission. The Design Reference Mission was never more than paper, but it applied more realistic numbers to Zubrin’s idea and demonstrated that a human Mars mission was within the realm of the possible. It may not have busted the NASA paradigm of massively expensive human spaceflight mission concepts, but it put some serious dents in that paradigm.
He seems to like it, and thinks it has the potential to change public perceptions, if it can reach the audience:
If the documentary does make it to cable television it would be a boon for Zubrin and his Mars Society, not only because it would be seen by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people (as opposed to the few thousands who would see a DVD), but also because the film does a better job at selling Zubrin’s ideas than he does himself. After watching The Mars Underground, many people will be convinced that exploring, settling, and even terraforming Mars is far easier than NASA would have you believe. Heck, I’m a realist and a skeptic, and it almost had me convinced. Almost.
Fo forth and read.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:27 AMGrant Bonin discusses the papers put out by the Space Frontier Foundation and the GAO on problems with NASA's exploration plans in todays issue of The Space Review.
It's worth the read, but being busy working on same plans, I would comment only on this bit:
Human-rating either the Atlas 5 or Delta 4 is likely to be an expensive proposition regardless of the fact that both boosters have already been developed (especially since no one really knows what it means to “human rate” these machines, beyond ensuring they don’t kill anybody). Also, since both the Atlas and Delta lines have very different assembly and integration processes (Boeing, for example, assembles its rockets horizontally for ease of access, while Lockheed uses a vertical integration facility), it may be particularly difficult to human-rate both varieties of launchers, and one option may inevitably gain preference as a result.
I agree that no one knows what human rating means, other than an excuse for NASA to not use the vehicle (since there hasn't been a human-rated spacecraft built, at least by the US, since the sixties). All I think that it should mean is to put in some kind of Failure Onset Detection (FOSD) that gives the astronauts enough warning that things are heading south to punch out. I don't understand why Grant thinks that assembly orientation would have anything at all to do with it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:02 AMMartin Peretz on Ned Lamont and the "netroots":
Mr. Lamont's views are...not camouflaged. They are just simpleminded. Here, for instance, is his take on what should be done about Iran's nuclear-weapons venture: "We should work diplomatically and aggressively to give them reasons why they don't need to build a bomb, to give them incentives. We have to engage in very aggressive diplomacy. I'd like to bring in allies when we can. I'd like to use carrots as well as sticks to see if we can change the nature of the debate." Oh, I see. He thinks the problem is that they do not understand, and so we should explain things to them, and then they will do the right thing. It is a fortunate world that Mr. Lamont lives in, but it is not the real one. Anyway, this sort of plying is precisely what has been going on for years, and to no good effect. Mr. Lamont continues that "Lieberman is the one who keeps talking about keeping the military option on the table." And what is so plainly wrong with that? Would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be more agreeable if he thought that we had disposed of the military option in favor of more country club behavior?Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:52 AM
For a Monday morning. From "Grim":
I suspect that we will one day speak of the war in Iraq the way we speak of the Spanish Civil War -- that is, rarely by comparison to the greater war that followed it. Peace is not in the cards. Things are going to get worse. Our enemies are glad to employ terrorists, who will try to bring the war to our homes. The wise man will prepare his sword, and the arm that may wield it.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:32 AM
GM may survive, if you can believe this journalist's take. Of course, he's a Detroit journalist.
I should point out that I have a semi-emotional stake in the outcome.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:23 PMI've never been a big fan of In'n'Out Burgers, but perhaps some of my readers are. And more importantly, Patricia is. She makes a point to go there whenever we go "home" to LA.
My major memory of them is all the corporate bumper stickers I used to see when I first move to LA, when many had removed the "B" and the "rs" from the name.
Anyway, one of the co-founders of the chain has died.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:19 PMOmar (of the Iraqi blog Iraq the Model) is concerned that it is. It certainly can't be rejected out of hand, given the insanities that have been spouting from Ahmadinejad's mouth recently. He certainly seems of a mind to immanentize the Islamic eschaton.
Morons who think that I'm a right-wing neocon Christer will, of course, scratch their heads at this post, thinking that my only concern is that it will preempt the Rapture.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:56 PMClark Lindsey notes (probably correctly):
Certainly one way to help insure that the exploration program continues past this administration would be to tie it closely with international partners as was done with the ISS in the early 1990s.
Based on history, it would also be a good way to insure that the program is delayed, over cost, and doesn't achieve its objectives. Back in 1993 NASA made a Faustian bargain. It would accept the need to make the station more "international" in exchange for keeping Congressional (and in that case, more importantly, administration) support. It won its appropriation by a single vote.
We went to the moon alone, and it was vastly successful, at least in terms of getting to the moon. There's no reason to think that bringing in other nations increases the probability of success, or reduce costs, even if it increases the probability of keeping the program alive politically. This is not a dig at other nations--it's simply a recognition of the degree to which bringing in other entities, with their own inscrutable politics (that, like ours, largely have nothing to do with space), can complicate and confound our own efforts. For recent (in the last four years) readers of this blog, I discoursed on this subject back in 2002.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:47 PM"I hope Nasrallah gets a rocket between the legs for what he is doing to me here, for harming grandma and grandpa."
Scare quotes in the title for the foolish troll who's been infesting my comments section for the last few days.
They're the words of an Arab. An Israeli Arab, of course.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:21 PMMicrosoft, that is.
I haven't been posting much because, even though I'm back home in Florida, we still have a lot of deliverables to complete this week. I'm working on a Word document, and when I try to save, I get a message that it can't because I either have too many files open, or there's no space on the disk. I only have one file open, and there's lots of space on the disk (I can download things to it, and save to it from other applications, and the problem appears on whatever drive I attempt to save to, including network drives).
For some reason, Word thinks that it has a problem that it doesn't. Has anyone ever seen this behavior? By the way, it's Word 97...
I'd work in Open Office, but I can't be sure that it will generate clean compatible files with tracked changes for the Word people to use when they integrate the book.
[Update about 6:30 Eastern]
It seems to be a problem with this particular file. I tried it on Patricia's machine and had the same problem. I can save smaller files, so I'll just have to cut'n'paste the sections I'm working on individually, and let them reintegrate it. But it doesn't look like a reinstall of Word or Office would fix it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:42 PMReuters has been caught doctoring photos to make Israel look bad? Shocking, just shocking! Errr...that they were finally caught, that is.
I hope that this photographer never gets another gig, but I'm sure that he'll probably get a plenty of offers from Middle Eastern media.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should add that Reuters gets a little credit (but not that much) for admitting it quickly (unlike CBS did). Of course, they had little choice, since the fakery was so blatantly obvious (though not much more so than the Rather memos).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:47 AMI've got a red eye to FLL in four hours, and am going to go for a walk on the beach and dinner beforehand. No telling for sure when I'll be back in California, pending a CEV announcement.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:33 PMFor Hezbollah. At least according to the editor of the Arab Times.
And don't expect Israel to let up. Even much of the Israeli (formerly) anti-war left now understands that they are literally in a fight for their lives.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:03 PMClark Lindsey has some thoughts on John Kavanagh's thoughts about NASA's potential conflict of interest in COTS/Constellation (at least as currently formulated). I might have some thoughts, too, but not today. Perhaps this weekend or next week, after I get home to Florida (where it now looks unlikely that we'll get any severe weather soon).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:56 AMJonah Goldberg has an interesting political theory about dairy states.
Two possible partial historic explanations (i.e. guesses) come to mind. First, the sorts of people who historically went into dairy production were Scandinavian socialist types while the people who went into meat production were Scotch-Irish cowboy types.Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:03 PMTwo: Perhaps dairy regulation occurred a lot earlier than meat regulation. This generated a culture of state-intervention and therefore a politics to match (or vice versa). Dairy also seems to be more about small-farmers and lots of labor, making it more prone to Populist appeals, while meat is run by wealthy ranchers and rugged cowboy types who have a more leave-me-alone ideology.
There's also a more metaphorical - i.e. b.s. - theory: dairy is nurturing. It's about sustainability. Dairy farmers can afford to fall in love with their cows. Making cows into steak, handburger and wallets requires more tough-mindedness. Dairy is soft America. Meat is hard America. Or Something Like That.
DeBeers won't be happy to hear about this:
Diamonds are no longer a girl's best friend, according to a new U.S. study that found three of four women would prefer a new plasma TV to a diamond necklace.
Works for me--I think that diamonds have been one of the biggest scams ever foisted on mankind. But how about an LCD?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:56 PMThey only arrested them and threw them in jail? Why didn't they simply hang them from the tree? After all, trees are much more important than children.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:47 PMHas anyone noticed that the leftist trolls who have been infesting the place recently haven't had much to say about Lileks' latest screed?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:31 PMDoes anyone know if there's way to get Moveable Type to display comments on a certain date, or some other script that would do that, and allow their deletion? Somehow I was hit with many hundreds of comment spams back on May 5th of this year, and they apparently came in so fast that MT didn't even send me email notifications of them. I've been looking at old posts, and they're infested with them. Furthermore, they aren't even blacklistable--the URLs are nonsense strings of characters (what was that all about, other than pure vandalism?).
I've been going through and deleting them as I find them, but it would take a long time to look at every one of thousands of posts. It would be nice to just see comments that were posted on that date. I'm sure that it would be possible to write such a script, but I'm wondering if one exists.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:13 PMAn interesting interview with Walid Phares, on the Middle East:
The U.S. and its allies can be accused of certain shortcomings as well. While the speeches by the U.S. president, congressional leaders from both parties, Tony Blair, and Jacques Chirac were right on target regarding Lebanon, and while the U.S. and its counterparts on the Security Council were diligent in their follow up on the Hariri assassination and on implementing UNSCR 1559, there was no policy or plan to support the popular movement in Lebanon. Incredibly, while billions were spent on the war of ideas in the region, Lebanese NGOs that wanted to resume the struggle of the Cedar Revolution and fighting alone for this purpose were not taken seriously at various levels. Policy planners thought they were dealing with the “Cedar Revolution” when they were meeting Lebanon’s government and Lebanese politicians. The difference between the high level speeches on Lebanon and the laissez-faire approach from lower levels is amazing. Simply put, there was no policy on supporting the Cedar Revolution against the three regimes opposing it and the $400 million received by Hezbollah from Iran.Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:39 PM...What is Israel’s plan in Lebanon? If its plan is mainly to bomb the infrastructure until a major political change occurs, it is unlikely to succeed. Analysts do not assume that this is the Israeli plan, since Hezbollah’s strategic ability to reemerge won’t be eliminated from the skies. Besides, all competent experts on Lebanon know that bombing until the Lebanese government does something also won’t work. This government, which failed to request international intervention when the conditions were favorable and has included Hezbollah and pro-Syrian ministers in its cabinet, is completely paralyzed.
A continuous “bombing-only” approach would hugely degrade Hezbollah’s infrastructure, but would also lead to the collapse of this government and the formation of a radical pro-Syrian, pro-Iranian government in Beirut. There would be a cease fire then, and Israel would get a year of respite, maybe less, before the Iranians and the Syrians would re-arm the new Hezbollah-led government in Lebanon. Meanwhile, the Cedar Revolution would be massacred and regional pressures would revert to Iraq.
Israel’s war with Hezbollah is not about the kidnapped soldiers or Katiushas. It is about Hezbollah’s attempt to remain a state within a state, and, along with Syria, to threaten Israel with missiles while Iran completes its nuclear armament. The rest can be easily imagined. And as long as there is no strategic change in Lebanon, starting with Hezbollah’s disarming and having international forces taking the control of the Lebanese-Syrian and Lebanese-Israeli borders, the bombings may give Israel some time, but will eventually transform Lebanon into an extension of Iran.
Clark Lindsey has dropped in on the Mars Society conference, which is in DC this year, and has some first-hand reports, on Mike Griffin's speech and the latest from Elon Musk and SpaceX.
I haven't spent much time reading them myself, being too busy, but when I do later, I may have some thoughts.
One question I do have, though. Just how big does Mike think is big enough for a heavy lifter for a Mars mission? How many decades does he plan to put off developing the critical technologies of orbital storage and handling of propellants, and vehicle assembly?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:44 PMJust in case you weren't aware that Pat Robertson is an idiot:
The Rev. Pat Robertson said he hasn't been a believer in global warming in the past, but this summer's record-breaking heat is "making a convert out of me."
Yes, we never had hot summers before we started driving those SUVs.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:17 PMLileks has some thoughts on current events in the Levant. There's a hint of sarcasm to them:
The US continues to support Israel. This is becoming difficult, since many important nations with well-dressed, urbane spokesmen have decided that Israel should stop its strange policy of firing rockets on UN-run stem-cell research facilities for no apparent reason. These diplomats will tolerate a little wartime madness – we all have our moments, after all – but enough is enough, and now they must go home and sit in the basement and wait for more rocket attacks. If they’re good, they will get a snack.Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:06 AMStrict Neutrality, or Dingellism. This may seem odd to some, given that one side consists of bloodthirsty religious lunatics who relish the indiscriminate killing of civilians, and the other is an Islamic social welfare organization reluctantly pressed into combat. (Any objections to those characterizations, Rep. D? Just curious.) Perhaps the West, in the name of fairness, could supply Hezbollah with the tools it requires. After all, it is manifestly unjust that Israel has such wizardly munitions on their side, and Hezbollah is forced to use crude de-vices made from disassembled Iranian baby-milk factory equipment. And it is rather condescending to believe that Hezbollah fires its missiles randomly without caring where they land; if they had access to precision munitions, it is possible they would aim more carefully.
...The usual delusions are abundant. The progressives imagine they’re the vanguard shielding the last jot of human rights from the ever-gathering fascist storm. (Forget the executions in Somalia for the crime of watching the World Cup; there’s a rumor Wal-Mart won’t offer the usual new-release discount for DVDs of Al Gore’s eco-doc.) They imagine that conservatives support Israel because they want to convert Jews and usher in the last book in the “Left Behind” series. They have internalized the Palestinian narrative so deeply they blame the “occupation” for rocket attacks coming out of territory no longer occupied. They’re so convinced of their rectitude that the obscenity of an Israeli flag spattered with swastikas makes perfect sense: why, if they weren’t actually Nazis, the progressives wouldn’t oppose them. They marched with communists for Worker’s Rights, regardless of whether anyone in communist countries had a job or any rights. And now they march with Hezbollah supporters for Peace and Justice.
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are going to campaign against him.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:41 PMIt's the Joooossss:
Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s primary run-off opponent has tapped into the pro-Israel fundraising network that helped her virtually unknown challenger Denise Majette topple McKinney and Artur Davis beat then-Rep. Earl Hilliard (D-Ala.) in a pair of hotly contested 2002 primaries in black-majority districts.Hank Johnson collected at least $34,100 on Tuesday from individuals and political action committees (PACs) that supported Majette, Davis or both, including several pro-Israel PACs. Overall, Johnson reported receiving $63,100 on Tuesday.
I'll actually miss the loon. On the other hand, if the Democrat party is ever going to become sane, it has to purge these creatures.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:14 PMThere's apparently been a pretty good temblor up in the north bay of the Bay Area (think Marin County) about twenty minutes ago. Maybe they'll mention it at the top of the hour.
You can bet that, with the heat we've had lately in CA (as well as everywhere else),people will be dredging up the claims about "earthquake weather."
Hopefully it's not a foreshock of something a lot bigger.
Is Hezbollah on the ropes? And Syria and Iran getting nervous?
If Israel continues to chase them north, it would be interesting to see what kinds of things have been stashed in the Bekaa Valley. Particularly of vintage early 2003...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:37 AMResearchers have been able to tailor semi-conductors one atom at a time.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:19 PMThis is a follow-up to the earlier post on whether or not gay men are more promiscuous than heterosexual men. I just read the transcript of Ann Coulter's comments at Kaus:
Mr. BEINART: It's called bigotry, Ann. What part of bigotry don't you understand?Ms. COULTER: Are you claiming that gays are generally not more promiscuous? Is that what you're claiming? Are both of you maintaining that gays are not--some segment of gays are not more promiscuous than heterosexuals? Is that the big point here?
KUDLOW: I...
Mr. BEINART: I'm saying that I don't know that there's any empirical evidence whatsoever here.
Ms. COULTER: No. I'm asking Larry here.
Mr. BEINART: And it's a--it's a--it's a bigoted stereotype that you are fomenting.
Ms. COULTER: You don't know any evidence that gays are more promiscuous than heterosexuals?
Mr. BEINART: Where's your--where's your evidence, Ann?
Ms. COULTER: Where have you been?
Mr. BEINART: Where's your evidence?
Ms. COULTER: It's a fact.
Mr. BEINART: Give me the evidence. Cite chapter and verse. You have no evidence whatsoever.
Ms. COULTER: I just cited the bathhouses. We don't have heterosexual bathhouses. It's well known.
Can anyone tell me what modifier is missing throughout this exchange (in which, while I'm not a big Coulter fan, and generally like Beinart, he comes off as an ignorant ass)? Hint, this isn't strictly about homosexual versus straight.
Oh, and for extra bonus points, is it a societal given that "gay" applies only to males, and not to homosexual females (i.e., lesbians)?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:18 PMPopular Mechanics has a new podcast up with interviews with Bob Bigelow (presumably on space hotels) and Tom Jones about spacewalking (among other non-space topics).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:42 AMThe Economist this week takes on the myth that we need our education system and economy to produce more scientists and engineers. If scientists and engineers are so valuable, why do they make less money than doctors, lawyers and business consultants? I shudder every time I hear doom predicted because of Asian engineers.
...doomsayers are guilty of the “techno-fetishism and techno-nationalism” described in 1995 by two economists, Sylvia Ostry and Richard Nelson. This consists, first, of paying too much attention to the upstream development of new inventions and technologies by scientists and engineers, and too little to the downstream process of turning these inventions into products that tempt people to part with their money, and, second, of the belief that national leadership in upstream activities is the same thing as leadership in generating economic value from innovation.Posted by Sam Dinkin at 09:36 AM
The latest roundup of links at New Space News is up.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:31 AMAnn Althouse (who's guest blogging over at Instapundit while Glenn does vital research on diving equipment in the Caymans) asks if it's bigoted to say that homosexual men are more promiscuous than heterosexual men.
Well, of course it's not (despite the fact that Ann Coulter said it). It's an obvious fact. But it's not because homosexual men are hornier than heterosexual men--it's because their partners are both much more willing and eager to put out, and to put up with promiscuity. Women serve as a governor on the libidinous urges of men. When men do it with men, there's nothing to damp the activity level.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:04 AMI'm flying back to Florida Friday night. It looks like the first business of the day will be putting up the shutters. I sure don't like the track of this storm. If it holds up, it's headed right for Palm Beach County.
[Update late morning EDT]
The latest track looks a little better for us, but not good for the Keys.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:57 AMThis is old news that I missed while at the NewSpace conference, but Lileks has a screed up about Howard Dean and the war that's still timely. It's funny, and sad (as Lileks often is):
...the revelatory moment in Dean’s assertion was its touching faith in Talk and Work. President Gore or Kerry would have been working day after day after day on the issue. Non stop! Sleeves rolled up, dinner at the desk: make another pot of coffee, Mabel, this Golan Heights dispute won’t solve itself. This suggests they believe the difficulties of the Middle East have the weight and consequence of a tariff dispute. This suggests that they don’t understand that the Hezbollah definition of “Disarm” is blowing off the limbs of Israelis. Imagine a typical negotiation:Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AMFierce-eyed Hezbollah representative: Thank you for the invitation; lovely office. Death to Israel.
Gullible American: Well, that’s just rhetoric; we understand.
Hezbollah: It is not rhetoric. It is truth. The Zionist entity is a festering infected splinter in the lip of the Caliphate.
(pause)
GA: So you’re saying you want some antibiotics as well? We can do that. But you have to show us you’re ready to coexist with Israel.
Hezbollah: We recognize the right of Israel to exist, but only as a footnote in history books.
Clark Lindsey has scored an interview with Glenn Reynolds on the subject of space.
He also has an interesting update on plans for Kistler.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:59 AM