With Jonah Goldberg, about his new book
I know that it's been half a century since America entered the space race, with the successful launch of Explorer I. I'll have a long piece up at Pajamas Media today or tomorrow on all of this week's space anniversaries.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:37 PMAndrew Ferguson has an interesting history of presidential campaigning and the relatively recent (and to me, bizarre) phenomenon of the need for "fire in the belly."
I don't have to wait until spring to miss Fred Thomson. His absence was quite obvious, even glaring, in the last two debates.
Thompson didn't give off the usual political vibe: the gnawing need to please, the craving for the public's love. A few voters and journalists found this refreshing, many more found it insulting.
I think that this is one of the reasons that reporters and pundits often acted as though he didn't exist--they were trying to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, and unfortunately, they succeeded. But I think that there were other reasons that the press didn't like Fred Thompson. For one thing, unlike John McCain, he was a true straight talker, and it wasn't the kind of centrist "liberal" "straight talk" that they liked to hear.
But I also think that they felt their livelihoods and stature threatened by him. After all, the conventional wisdom had become that the campaigns now had to start two years before the election, and if that's the case, it gives journalists a lot more to cover for a longer period of time. By his late entry, Fred stood to potentially upset that applecart. If he could enter late, and still win, it would not only show the pundits who proclaimed the need for early campaigning to be laughably wrong, but it would also make people think twice about wasting time and money campaigning for a year before New Hampshire in the next cycle, and then what would the political reporters have to do?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:54 AMHere's an interesting article on the economics of repugnance. As Sally Satel (and her donor, Virginia Postrel) have pointed out, an unwillingness to allow a market in kidneys is murdering thousands every year, to help ease the stomach of so-called biomedical "ethicists."
Note to Leon Kass, and others: the "yuck" factor, like all emotions, should be viewed as suggestions, not commands.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:28 AMNancy Cartwright gave ten megabucks to the Church of Scientology. P. T. Barnum had nothing on L. Ron Hubbard.
Like cocaine, this is life's way of telling you that you make too damn much money.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:27 AMSay something like this in a debate:
Will McCain, who finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy and who lost five jets, return competence to the White House?
Heh. It's funny 'cuz it's true.
Can't see Romney doing it, though.
[Update in the afternoon]
Was that a cheap shot? Probably. Certainly the aircraft accident on the deck wasn't McCain's fault, nor was getting shot down when he ended up in the Hanoi Hilton. But as I note in comments, he's not a very nice guy, by all accounts, and it's the kind of thing that he'd do himself (after all, he insists on continuing to lie about Romney's "timetable" record) so it would be poetic justice if such a thing caused him to reveal his true nature.
[Another update about 3 PM EST]
This seems relevant: Mark Levin:
Let's get the largely unspoken part of this out the way first. McCain is an intemperate, stubborn individual, much like Hillary Clinton. These are not good qualities to have in a president. As I watched him last night, I could see his personal contempt for Mitt Romney roiling under the surface. And why? Because Romney ran campaign ads that challenged McCain's record? Is this the first campaign in which an opponent has run ads questioning another candidate's record? That's par for the course. To the best of my knowledge, Romney's ads have not been personal. He has not even mentioned the Keating-Five to counter McCain's cheap shots. But the same cannot be said of McCain's comments about Romney.
Last night McCain, who is the putative frontrunner, resorted to a barrage of personal assaults on Romney that reflect more on the man making them than the target of the attacks. McCain now has a habit of describing Romney as a "manager for profit" and someone who has "laid-off" people, implying that Romney is both unpatriotic and uncaring. Moreover, he complains that Romney is using his "millions" or "fortune" to underwrite his campaign. This is a crass appeal to class warfare. McCain is extremely wealthy through marriage. Romney has never denigrated McCain for his wealth or the manner in which he acquired it. Evidently Romney"s character doesn't let him cross certain boundaries of decorum and decency, but McCain's does. And what of managing for profit? When did free enterprise become evil? This is liberal pablum which, once again, could have been uttered by Hillary Clinton.And there is the open secret of McCain losing control of his temper and behaving in a highly inappropriate fashion with prominent Republicans, including Thad Cochran, John Cornyn, Strom Thurmond, Donald Rumsfeld, Bradley Smith, and a list of others. Does anyone honestly believe that the Clintons or the Democrat party would give McCain a pass on this kind of behavior?
As I said, better to get this out there now, rather than wait until the nominee has been chosen.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:15 AMA Clinton aide in a fund-raising scandal? Who would have ever imagined such a thing?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AMJust out of curiosity, I decided to see if the domain writeinfred.com was taken. It was, and it was up before the Florida primary:
...we urge all conservatives to VOTE FOR FRED DALTON THOMPSON during your state's primpary [sic]. And if he isn't on the ballot, WRITE-IN FRED THOMPSON. It is imperative that we sent a message to our party and our nation, that it is time to return to ideals of our founders and our constitution. Its [sic] time we send a message to our party and the media that this should once again become a serious process among professionals who are serious about the task at hand and not just looking for power and prestige. Its [sic] time we return to citizen servants who seek to further the cause of democracy and not just their self interests.
They could use an editor, but I'm certainly sympathetic to the cause.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:34 AM...the atmosphere explodes?
This planet is dangerous. I really think we need a back up.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:54 AMThe Local Area Network is thirty years old. An interesting history, and prospects for its future. I personally still find wireless too unreliable, even in the house. I'm going to be running CAT6 now that things have cooled off in the attic.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:17 AMBut not surprising.
I'm listening to Rudy Giuliani endorse John McCain. One RINO (or at least CINO) endorsing another. This makes the route uphill for Mitt (who I'm not thrilled with either, but at least he's not McCain) even steeper.
I think that Ronald Reagan is spinning in his grave, that this is happening at his presidential library.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:18 PMLook who's thinking about getting into the race. Hey, I voted for him in 2000.
I hope that Bloomberg gets in, too. With Hillary!/Obama, McCain, Nader and Bloomberg in the race, the so-called liberal vote would be split four ways, perhaps leaving an opening for an actual conservative to run on an independent ticket.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:52 AMEuropeans are coming to the conclusion that Islam is dangerous:
"An overwhelming majority of the surveyed populations in Europe believe greater interaction between Islam and the West is a threat." Backbench Tory MP David Davies told the Sunday Express: "I am not surprised by these findings. People are fed up with multiculturalism and being told they have to give up their way of life."
"Most people in Britain expect anyone who comes here to be willing to learn our language and fit in with us."Mr Davies, who serves on the Commons Home Affairs Committee, added: "People do get annoyed when they see millions spent on translating documents and legal aid being given to people fighting for the right to wear a head-to-toe covering at school."
...But leading Muslim academic Haleh Afshar, of York University, blamed media "hysteria" for the findings. She said: "There is an absence of trust towards Muslims, but to my mind that is very much driven by an uninformed media."
An "uninformed media."
Yes. That must be it.
It couldn't have anything to do with riots over cartoons, or bombings in the tube.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:23 AMThat well-known right winger, Alexander Cockburn, confesses his sins on the climate change religion.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:19 AMOne of the prevailing myths of modern life (I use the word here in the sense of something that everyone believes, not necessarily something that is false) is that cholesterol causes heart disease and stroke, and that reducing it will reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke. But the recent Vytorin issue should give us cause to question this conventional wisdom.
Whenever I've looked at the research, I've never been able to see any clear indication that taking cholesterol-reducing medication actually reduces risk, per se--all that the clinical studies that I've seen seem to indicate is that cholesterol reduction is taking place. But correlation is not causation. It could be that both high cholesterol and vascular disease are caused by some third factor that hasn't been identified, and that in reducing cholesterol, whether by diet or medication, or both, we are treating a symptom rather than a cause.
My point is, that I don't know the answer. But I don't have a lot of confidence that the medical community does, either. And I remain wary of taking medications with unknown side effects and potential for interaction with other things I ingest, when the benefit is unclear. And I write this as someone who lost both parents to heart disease (my father's first heart attack occurred when he was about forty five, and he died from a second one about a decade later). But they also had much different lifestyles than I did--they grew up with poor diets during the depression, they both smoked like chimneys, and they were both overweight. So I don't necessarily believe that genetics is destiny, at least in this case.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 AMI don't know where Iowahawk finds these things. I barely remember Makaniak myself.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:26 AMI'll have a piece up on this myself later in the week (the anniversary is actually Thursday), but John Noble Wilford has some thoughts on the past fifty years since Explorer I.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:03 PMFrom Patricia:
I voted in the middle of the day, when lines were short at my polling location, in the assembly room of a neighborhood Catholic church. At the beginning of the sidewalk to the polling place, I was met by a woman who asked me if I wanted to participate in an exit poll. Being the suspicious person that I am, I declined, noting that she was sitting close to people with Obama and Clinton campaign signs. Not accepting my decline, she asked again, telling me in a serious tone that my participation would allow them to assure that the voting machines were working correctly. I laughed, and declined again and continued walking toward the polling place passing by the exit-poll table set up in the shade of the building, manned by three or four nicely dressed men. I was met just outside the door to the polling place by an official in a vest who asked to see my voter registration card, which I showed him. After looking at the card, he directed me to the table right inside the door.Once inside, I could see that other tables were set up for other precincts voting at this location. I went to my precinct table right inside the door as directed and found about five people in the line in front of me. The table was set up with signs designating alphabetical groupings and women in chairs on the other side of the table to look up voter names in printouts of registered voters matching the alphabetical groupings. Apparently, all the people in front of me had last names in the same alphabetical grouping as mine. There were no people in front of the other alphabetical groupings. And they were all problem voters. None of them had voter registration cards, or knew what precinct they were from, but nevertheless ended up at my precinct table. One by one their names were looked up in the one copy of S-Z and not found. After a few irrelevant questions from the women behind the tables: Are you married? Did your husband vote here? Did you move? Are you sure you are registered? These generally provoked irritated responses from them. After wasting time thusly, they were then sent to another table where a man with a computer would help them.
I finally got to the front of the line, but since the S-Z printout was in use, I had to wait a bit longer for my name to be found in it. Finally, my name was found in the S-Z printout. I signed on the appropriate line in the printout and, after the woman behind the desk scrutinized my sloppy signature for a match with my registration card, she gave me my ballot and sent me to the voting booths. Immediately available for my use were at least ten booths. Since the process of signing in created such a delay, getting a ballot and the amount of time to vote was short, due to only a couple of items on the ballot, and no lines had formed to use them. The bottleneck was clearly the sign-in process, not the number of machines.
Voting took me only a few seconds on the new touch-screen voting machine. I returned my ballot and received my "I Voted" stamp. Pleased with myself for exercising my voting rights in this wonderful democracy, wadding up my stamp, I walked past the exit-poll table where several poor schmucks who had agreed to take the exit poll were filling out paperwork, surrounded by three or four men ready to answer questions, or ask them, I really don't know.
Ah, democracy, how confusing for those who don't know what precinct they live in, or bother to change their address on their voter registration, or read their mail when they get their card, or believe campaign workers who assure them that voting machines are working correctly.
Remember, this is from the heart of "hanging chad country."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PMPhotoshop is running in Linux. If they can work out the last incompatibility bugs in Open Office, we'll start to reach a tipping point, given the unhappiness with Vista.
[Tuesday evening update]
More bad news for Microsoft. Firefox has reached 30% market penetration in Europe.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:15 PMThis looks like a pretty slick technology:
Lockheed for the first time has been testing a digital beam array to locate and track live targets--in this case, commercial and military aircraft coming in and out of the Philadelphia area. "The hard part was how we combined all the data ... to form the individual beams," Scott Smith, program manager for the radar system at Lockheed, tells PM. Commercially available high-speed digital electronics and advanced signal processors have become advanced enough to allow this data processing to occur, and that in turn has enabled digital beamforming to become practical for use outside a lab.
It will be helpful for ATC, but it has obvious military applications:
Digital beamforming radars will likely find their first homes on ships that track missile threats to U.S. fleets. Those threats will come from ballistic launches hundreds of miles away or from high-speed missiles launched from submarines or warplanes. The Russian government has been busy selling sea-skimming, antiship missiles to China that are designed to overwhelm the U.S. fleet's radars, so the ability to track multiple, fast-moving threats could become vital in the Taiwan Straits. But a digitized phased array radar can handle many incoming signals at once, and should be able to discern real threats from bits of metal or shaped decoy balloons.So somewhere a Chinese admiral is frowning at Lockheed's news, and a Taiwanese general is smirking.
Expect the usual suspects, any minute, to claim that it is "destabilizing" (a phrase they use any time the US comes up with a better way to defend itself).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:02 PMThoughts on space tourism, "shooting down" errant satellites, and gray goo, in a podcast with Instapundit.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:39 AMMany false lessons have been learned from the Shuttle program in general, and from the Challenger loss particularly. Chair Force Engineer explains:
NASA management's most enduring lesson from Challenger is the flawed mantra of "Crew must be kept separate from cargo." While such flawed logic is enough to trick Congress into funding the development of two very different launchers, it doesn't always hold true. If a launcher can be made safe enough for a human crew, there's no reason why it can't be trusted with carrying a reasonable amount of cargo at the same time.
Yes, that's one of the more illogical ones. He has more.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:59 AMStill no answer:
"I can tell you for certain that, when we do determine the cause, that it will be published so that it can't happen to others," Rutan said. "But we don't know yet what caused the detonation."
This seems to me a serious setback. If I were them, I'd be talking to XCOR and others, and doing a vehicle redesign to accommodate a different (liquid, not hybrid) engine. They have been overhyping the safety of hybrids for too long on this program, and the fact that they killed three men and wounded three more is going to have an effect on the perception of the engine's safety, even if it was not something that could rationally be expected in flight. As long as they don't know what happened, they can't move forward. They're sort of in the same position as NASA, dealing with an unknown risk, but betting on the come, and hoping that they'll have it figured out in a year or so, in time to start flight tests under rocket propulsion. But as I said, hope is not a plan.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:51 AMAv Week has a fairly detailed technical description of the thrust oscillation problem:
"Conservative" calculations of the potential frequency and amplitude of a thrust oscillation that could occur in the first stage as it nears burnout, and of the way that vibration links to the rest of the vehicle, suggest that it could set up a resonance that would damage critical components and harm the crew (AW&ST Dec. 10, 2007, p. 60).A thrust-oscillation "focus team," convened in November 2007, has since calculated that the problem may not be as severe as it appeared earlier in the fall. But the work continues under a looming March deadline, set so designers on both the launch vehicle and Orion can start work in earnest on mitigating the effect, if necessary, before preliminary design review (PDR) at the end of the summer.
"That gives us a good view of the problem with what we see as how big the risk is, [along with] what are the right mitigation strategies for any residual risk left, so that going into PDR we have a good handle on it and we're designing for it," says Garry Lyles, an experienced launch vehicle engineer at Marshall who heads the focus team. "You're not waiting downstream of the [PDR] to start designing your system to accommodate the oscillation."
Emphasis mine. If it "may not be," it also "may be." This goes beyond risk (which is quantifiable), into uncertainty, which by definition is not, and that's an unhappy place for an engineer to be. They continue with the "may not be" language.
...the focus team has since calculated that the problem may not be as severe as originally feared. Nominally the oscillation frequency of a five-segment booster is 12 Hz. (compared with 15 Hz. for the four-segment version). But after that it gets complicated. Translating RSRM ground-test data into accurate forcing function figures and the stack's response to that force is extremely difficult, particularly since the upper-stage and Orion designs remain immature and oscillation data are based on ground tests.
They can do flight tests on a Shuttle SRB, but that still won't tell them how a five-segment motor will behave (though it will give them better data with which to model it). But as it notes, there's no way to model the dynamic structural behavior of the stack, because they don't have enough fidelity in the design. They are risking going into a program, spending billions more, without certain knowledge that they'll have a viable system until they're well along in the development, at which point they might find out that they have to essentially start over from scratch.
...if the problem doesn't go away with more data and more refined calculations, or can't be fixed with propellant redesign, then isolation pads and other mechanical fixes probably will add weight to the overall vehicle. Making it work could eat into the weight margins held at various levels of the Ares I and Orion programs (AW&ST Dec. 10, 2007, p. 52).Although the problem isn't fully understood, none of the NASA engineers involved in solving it sees it as a show-stopper.
"I hope this is the worst we've got to deal with," says NASA Administrator Michael Griffin.
Well, apparently, they're not allowed to see it as a show stopper. People get fired for pointing out that the emperor is naked.
As Dr. Laura says, hope has no power, Mike. It is not a plan. And there are numerous other solutions.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:48 AMSonia Arrison writes about progress in genetic engineering and other life-enhancing/extending techniques.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:31 AMSuch is the state of my disgust with the Bush administration that, it being my birthday, I probably won't bother to listen to his State of the Union speech tonight. But I recall another SOTU speech, exactly five years ago (on a previous birthday), that contained the sixteen words that the media continues to tell the Big Lie about, in their continuing attempt to maintain the conventional wisdom that it was wrong to remove Saddam Hussein.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:47 PMHere's another news item out of Britain this week: A new version of The Three Little Pigs was turned down for some "excellence in education" award on the grounds that "the use of pigs raises cultural issues" and, as a result, the judges "had concerns for the Asian community" — ie, Muslims. Non-Muslim Asians — Hindus and Buddhists — have no "concerns" about anthropomorphized pigs.This is now a recurring theme in British life. A while back, it was a local government council telling workers not to have knick-knacks on their desks representing Winnie-the-Pooh's porcine sidekick, Piglet. As Martin Niemöller famously said, first they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character and, if I was, I'm more of an Eeyore. So then they came for the Three Little Pigs, and Babe, and by the time I realized my country had turned into a 24/7 Looney Tunes it was too late, because there was no Porky Pig to stammer "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" and bring the nightmare to an end.
Just for the record, it's true that Muslims, like Jews, are not partial to bacon and sausages. But the Koran has nothing to say about cartoon pigs. Likewise, it is silent on the matter of whether one can name a teddy bear after Mohammed. What all these stories have in common is the excessive deference to Islam. If the Three Little Pigs are verboten when Muslims do not yet comprise ten per cent of the British population, what else will be on the blacklist by the time they're, say, 20 per cent?
And some related thoughts from Roger Kimball.
I am at the point where I think that we should say that no more mosques will be built in this country with Saudi money until there are churches and synagagues in Riyadh.
Charles Martel rolls in his grave.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:29 PMThis weekend, I met a young woman, now attending law school in Ann Arbor, who was in diapers when it happened. To her, it's ancient unremembered history, just as the Eisenhower administration is to me (though I at least study it, unlike most of my age cohorts). It made me feel old. We have a generation, though, about ten years older than her, now in their thirties, for whom it was probably the most traumatic event of their young lives. The comments are closed on my post from six years ago, but anyone who wants to post remembrances can do it here, with the caveat that I still haven't completely recovered from my recent MT upgrade (still hoping that someone who knows it will volunteer to help), so you can use them, but they will time out. Don't expect to get a response after submitting the comment. Just back up after a while, and refresh the page to see it.
I'm particularly interested in how the event changed your perception of the Shuttle, and the space program in general, if at all, per my previous thoughts.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:28 PMBob Zubrin is still selling flex-fueled cars (at least conceptually), which might be a good idea, but I wish that he weren't doing so with over-the-top rhetoric and economic ignorance. Here's the very first graf:
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez recently joined Iranian president Mahmoud Amadinejad in threatening to raise oil prices to $200 per barrel. The threat should be taken quite seriously. With no practical transportation fuel alternative to petroleum available to the world market, the OPEC oil cartel has already been successful in raising prices an order of magnitude since 1999, with a 50 percent increase effected in 2007 alone.
I disagree that this threat should be taken seriously. The notion that oil can ever get to a sustainable $200/barrel, in inflation and currency-adjusted terms, is ludicrous, regardless of the clearly malign intent of Hugo and Mahmoud. They are not capable of achieving this. No one is.
First of all, they don't control the world's oil markets. The Saudis (and increasingly, the Iraqis) will have a major say as well. But even if you could get an agreement within OPEC to do so (a ludicrous notion in itself, because the individual members tend to look after their own interests), it still would never happen. First, many states would cheat. But more importantly, the current price is unsustainable at near-term (over the next decade or two) projected demand levels because there are many new sources that are available at production costs much lower than current prices (e.g., tar sands and shale in the western US and Canada). The only reason that they haven't brought down the price yet is that they're only starting to come on line.
And if the price did somehow get to that value (as the Saudis understand, even if economically ignorant boobs like Ahmadinejad and Chavez don't) it would cause a recession that would depress world wide demand. Also, unless you can drive the price of oil to zero, it's not going to starve the oil dictators of their oil revenues. The only way to do that is to take away their oil (as we did with Saddam). I'm not necessarily proposing that we do so--just pointing out the only realistic way to accomplish it.
On top of this, much of the price rise that Bob Zubrin decries is due to the weak dollar, and has nothing to do with either supply or demand of oil.
Maybe such overblown rhetoric and economic nonsense will sell the concept for him; it's certainly worked to good effect for the global warm-mongers--but I'd be more persuaded if he'd be more realistic. There are a lot of good arguments for ending the burning of oil for transportation as soon as we can, and I wish that he'd stick to them, instead of doing an impression of Gary North.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:54 AMThe New York chapter of NOW is slamming Ted Kennedy. It is either going to be a very ugly campaign, or a very ugly convention in Denver. Maybe both.
I just wish that he'd offered Hillary! a ride home in his car.
[Update late afternoon]
I am loving this. Al "Race Baiter" Sharpton is telling the first black president to shut up."
Wish he'd said that sixteen years ago.
I'm going to have to order a couple more barrels of popcorn just to get me through to the convention in Denver.
[Update at 5 PM EST]
Read the comments at this post by Megan McCardle. One example:
I believe it is closer to a null set than Hillary is counting on. I am a southern, middleaged, working-class white guy who has voted for the Democrat in every election since I turned 18 and will not vote for Sen Clinton regardless of who her oponent is. She would hurt the Democratic party almost as much as Bush has hurt the GOP. I will not be a party to it.Posted by Larry Geater | January 24, 2008 8:57 AM
I'm a Dem and will never vote for Hillary in the general after the last few weeks. What she's doing to cling to power is simply nauseating.
I will be abstaining, or I will take a good look at the republican candidate to see if his character is better then hers.
I also think she'll find that she poisoned her chance, as I and many others Dems would have voted for her if she wasn't trying to tear the party apart.
She's going to have a hard time come next Nov
Posted by Donkey | January 24, 2008 9:00 AM
When we were over in Naples this weekend, someone told us that he hates George Bush, but that he's seriously thinking about voting Republican this year for the first time.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:46 AMThis is a week of space anniversaries. Yesterday was forty-one years since the Apollo fire that killed three astronauts on the launch pad as horrified technicians watched during a ground test. Thursday will be the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the first US satellite, Explorer I. Friday will be five years since the Columbia disintegrated over the otherwise quiet morning skies of Texas.
But today is the twenty-second anniversary of the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, an event that traumatized the nation as millions of schoolchildren watched the first "teacher in space" go up in a fireball on live television. I'll never forget the date because it was then (as it remains) coincident with the anniversary of my birth.
It wasn't obvious to many at the time, but that event was the beginning of the end of the Space Shuttle program, then less than five years old, with its first flight having occurred on April 12th, 1981. Prior to that flight, there had still been plans (that some thought fantasies, due to budget restrictions and ongoing problems of turnaround time) of twenty-four flights a year (including a couple per year out of Vandenberg AFB in California). The catastrophe was a splash of cold water in the face of those who had held out hopes for the Shuttle in terms of meeting its original promises of routine, affordable, safe access to orbit. Those promises had caused people (like those in the L5 Society) to dream of space stations, and space manufacturing, and ultimately, space colonies.
After the disaster, many realized that if those dreams were to come true, they would have to be by some means other than the Shuttle (a realization that some later took one step further and decided that NASA itself was unlikely to be of much help in achieving the goals, particularly since it continued to flout the law, and had no interest in them whatsoever). But the program went on, because it was all NASA had for manned spaceflight, and it maintained jobs in the districts of politically powerful congressmen and senators. Though there had been disillusionment about the promise of the program, there was no political will to replace it. The few (misguided) attempts (NASP, X-33, SLI, OSP) to replace it all floundered or failed. The latter two morphed from one to the other. The program thus struggled along with four orbiters, and a low flight rate, with occasional fleet stand downs due to endemic problems, such as hydrogen leaks at the interface, or other concerns.
But the final blow was struck five years ago this coming Friday, with the loss of Columbia. The fleet was down to three birds, and unlike the case after the loss of Challenger, no structural spares had been procured with which to build a new one, and the tooling for them had long since been scrapped. So the decision was finally made, almost seventeen years after the loss of the first orbiter, to end the program.
Unfortunately, what is planned to replace it, Ares 1/Orion, will be little improvement, and in some ways a major step backwards. It will launch even fewer crew than Shuttle, and while the Shuttle was a heavy-lift vehicle capable of delivering twenty tons to the space station, the new system will deliver little payload other than crew. It will have minimal ability to return payloads and no ability to return the types of payloads that the Shuttle could. It will likely cost as much or more per launch, particularly when having to amortize the development costs, which had been long sunk for the Shuttle, and it's unlikely to launch much, if any, more often. We will go from a system that could deliver a few government employees (along with a couple dozen tons of paylad) into space a few times a year, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per flight to a system that can deliver fewer government employees (with essentially no paylad) into space a few times a year, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per flight. The only saving grace is that, in theory, it can also deliver people to the moon, and it may be somewhat safer.
But the Shuttle started out with a dream: of dozens of flights per year, of low costs per flight, of many flights for many purposes, some of which would be privately funded for private purposes. In canceling most launch vehicle technology development, and returning to a horrifically expensive concept from the 1960s, NASA has in essence officially declared that dream dead.
Fortunately, investors don't take NASA as seriously as they used to, and the dream now lives on in the form of new private companies, determined to open up the heavens to all of us, and not just a few civil servants. If we hadn't lost the Challenger over two decades ago, the Columbia loss might have been seen as an anomaly in an otherwise-successful program. As in 1986, it might have simply been replaced (albeit at great expense) with the structural spares that were earlier used to build Endeavor, and the program might still be lumbering on, keeping us trapped in low earth orbit, and continuing to crush the dreams of those who believe that we can do better. If that loss back then was a necessary catalyst to ultimately end the program and spur on efforts to do better privately, even if delayed, then perhaps the sacrifice of the Challenger crew will, in the long run of history, be viewed as not for naught.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:50 AMA solution?
They started with two common food preservatives--the same stuff, BHA and BHT, that keeps Wonder Bread fresh for weeks--as a means to carry away free radicals before they can cause harm.But for the food preservatives to become effective, the scientists needed a way to get them inside cells.
That's where carbon nanotubes, single layers of carbon atoms curved into tiny cylinders, came in handy. The research team attached the food preservatives to the nanotubes, which, because of their size, provided a perfect vehicle for traversing the body's arteries and entering cells.
Tour said he began his research with the goal of finding a drug to protect astronauts on long-duration space missions from the radiation to which they are exposed outside Earth's atmosphere.
But the test results in mice, which were given the drug 30 minutes before a blast of radiation, were so impressive that Tour thought the drug might have much broader potential.
I hope that the real promise is for deep space travel, not for a nuclear war. We need to do everything we can to avoid the latter, but if not, this will help as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:53 AMOK, I'm slowly getting things back to normal. I still have to fix the templates on my individual entry sheets, and there are some problems with style sheets, as you can see by the flaky typefaces. The biggest problem remains comments, which still aren't working as advertised. I've got some questions up on the MT fora, but no useful response yet. I also have a problem with the software hanging when I publish a post (it just times out and gives me a 500). Fortunately, it seems to do what it's supposed to do before that happens, but it's a PITA. I'm hoping that some MT type can tell me how to run a debugger to figure out where and what the problem is. The real problem is that it also means that it times out when submitting a comment, so if anyone tries to do that, they'll get frustrated, and perhaps end up doing it multiple times. So I'm going to have to disable them for now.
Still working problems and not much time for blogging, though I'm working on a SS2 piece for another venue, and I'll probably be blogging the debate tonight at Pajamas, since it's just around the corner from me, over at FAU.
I'm going to keep this post at the top for a while, as a warning that the site is still under construction. Don't let any bytes fall on your head.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:53 AMOf either party.
"I fully support the president's Vision for Space Exploration. I believe that we should expand our presence beyond low earth orbit, and establish a human civilization into the solar system, going to the moon, the asteroids, Mars and points beyond, which is what the vision was in its essence. However, I'm extremely disappointed in the implementation of it to date by NASA, and if elected, I pledge to revisit the Aldridge Report, which required that the vision be fully integrated with the commercial sector and that it support national security goals, and restructure it in order to do so."
One could obviously expand on it in detail, but that's what's missing from the debate, in my opinion.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:13 AMI know, comments are still broken (though I think you may be able to comment if you have a TypePad account). I'm going over to Naples for the weekend, though, so no solution until Monday (which is also the Challenger anniversary).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:37 AMMccain-Feingold essentially outlaws political discussion during campaigns by private groups (yes, really, and the Supreme Court had no problem with that), but it does have (fortunately) some limitations. It only applies to criticizing people actually running for office. It says nothing about ads attacking candidate's spice (spouses?). This could have delicious consequences this fall, unless John and Russ rush back to the Hill to amend the bill.
I can already see the 527s lining up to run ads against the Big He, reminding the country of everything that went on back in the nineties that they never heard about, or had forgotten, with the word CLINTON featured prominently, in big letters. Hillary's going to wish that she hadn't taken her husband's name. But of course, at the time, she did so for political reasons.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AM[Welcome, Instapundit readers. My blog is undergoing refurbishment. You can comment, but they'll be moderated, and expect your submission to time out. Don't redo it. Just let it time out and then back up to the post with a couple clicks.]
This debate is only three or four miles from the house, but like the rest of you (if you're watching at all) I'm watching it on the tube. I can't get away from the NBC crew completely, but no reason I have to be in the same room with them. Plus, the booze is cheaper here, there's no competition for the bandwidth or power with the rest of the press, and I can wear my pajamas.
So, in a few minutes, they're off!
The announcer mispronounces "Boca Raton." It's not like baton, it's a Spanish word (it means "rat"). It's pronounced with a long "o." Good thing he's not after any local votes...
First question is to Romney, a softball right over the plate, about whether or not he agrees with the President's economic plan. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about, as would be expected from a businessman. Focusing on capital expenditures, etc. Not sure how it will sell to the general public, though. Wants to expand FHA and loosen requirements to help out homeowners.
Will McCain support the part of the economic stimulus plan that doesn't make tax cuts permanent? Yes he will, though disappointed. Wants to not only make cuts permanent, but also to cut corporate income taxes. Worried that pork will be added. Happy to allow faster expensing of capital investments.
McCain is definitely trying to sound like a conservative on tax and fiscal policy.
Giuliani supports package, but doesn't think it goes far enough. Wants a Dryer package that would be the biggest tax cut in American history. Wants to make America competitive with the rest of the world, reduce taxing, suing, etc. Major reductions in taxes, spending, regulations, specifically SOX. Doesn't want London to take over as world's financial capital from New York.
Now McCain is defending his economic knowledge, and citing Reagan, Feldstein, Kemp, etc. Still attempting to sound conservative economically.
Huckabee being asked if he trusts Romney as a tax cutter. Evading the issue, talking about budgets and surpluses. Talking about borrowing from the Chinese and worried that we'll be stimulating their economy more than ours. Proposing expanding I-95 with American labor and materials (Bangor to Miami). Playing to the Florida audience, who want more lanes on it.
Romney says worked with Democrats to solve problems in Massachussetts without tax increases. Doesn't take the bait on whether he trusts Huckabee and McCain on taxes.
McCain asked if he considers Romney's "fees" equivalent to taxes. "I'm sure that the people who paid them think the are." Still talking like a conservative on tax and spending. Wonder if anyone will bring up his rhetoric from 2001 about "tax cuts for the rich"?
Ron Paul worried about spending and printing too much money. Lower taxes, get rid of regulations, and devise monetary policy that "makes some sense." Doesn't think we should expect Fed to monetize more spending. Can't afford to "maintain empire," and says that every war has resulted in inflation.
Giuliani asked about turning down the Saudi check for the Twin Towers fund. Can't get away from 911, but not his fault, because Russert asked. Talking about mutuality of interest when countries invest in the US. Talking about the fact that Japan wasn't the danger we thought they were in the eighties. Have to be careful that there is no ulterior motive in investments but we need to think how much we can sell to the world.
Democrats have eighteen point advantage in confidence in dealing with economy according to Russert. Reads litany of statistics. Why should we trust Republicans.
McCain, says that Dems will increase spending, increase taxes, won't restore stability of entitlements which are becoming unfunded in the future. Talking about "outrageous" $35B pork that could have paid for tax credits for every child in America. Will regain confidence of American people in being careful stewards of their money.
Huckabee: same question. "I wasn't there in Washington at the time." Can't blame it all on Bush, was keeping America safe. He was the only one saying that the economy wasn't doing great early on in debate season. Playing populist and friend of the "little guy" again. Talking about "trickle up" impact on the economy of low-paid workers.
Romney running on his record of accomplishment in Massachusetts, and running against Washington. Don't live by high ethics, haven't solved illegal immigration, haven't solved oil problems, haven't solved spending. "When Republicans act like Democrats, America loses." Have to rein in entitlements costs.
Giuliani saying that he's got experience turning an economy around in New York.
Ron Paul says that he doesn't have to run from Washington, because he's been fighting it from within. He's never voted for a tax increase, and almost always votes against spending. Entering a new era with dollar and world economy.
Local questions coming up now.
McCain: Army on verge of breaking, and can't sustain present spending. We cannot sustain our presence in Iraq.
McCain knows of no military leader who says we can't sustain ourselves in Iraq, including Petraeus. Attacking Clinton and saying that if we withdraw, Al Qaeda will have won. Proud to say that we have to abandon Rumsfeld strategy and do what we're doing now. Proud of military, and don't want us to raise the white flag as Senator Clinton does.
Romney: How do you maintain military without a draft? Talks about enrollment and retention in Mass National Guard. Thinks that people in military need full ride when they get home. Points out that Democrats' answers in last debate indicated that getting out was more important than winning. He won't walk away from Iraq until successful. How audacious of Dems to claim that they are responsible for success in Iraq. "due to General Petraeus, not General Clinton."
Will they say that the war was a good idea, worth the price?
McCain says that it was worth getting rid of Saddam, and is attacking Rumsfeld. War is justified by threat of Saddam. Now on right track and if we withdraw Al Qaeda will be claiming victory and the world will believe them. Wants troops to return with honor.
Giuliani points out that when polls where in favor that Hillary was, and that when polls were against, she was against. He always supported it, and continues to.
Ron Paul has the expected answer.
Huckabee says that it's easy to second guess a president, but says he should be admired for not governing by polls.
Romney supported and continues to support, but war was undermanaged and understaffed. Now on the right track, and making sure that Al Qaeda has no safe haven there from which to launch attacks against us. Democrats are just run and retreat, regardless of the problems.
[A couple minutes later]
Back from commercial break. Brian Williams can't pronounce Boca Raton, either.
Question from Romney to Giuliani. China will be a tough competitor. How do we maintain jobs here and have trade done on a level playing field. Giulian says that China is a great opportunity and great caution for America. More we engage in trade more we get to know a country and less probability of military confrontation. Need to be careful about safety and security, but look at bringing millions of people out of poverty there every year as huge opportunity. They need energy and information processes more than we do. They need to buy what we have. We should increase the size of our military to repair the damage of Bill Clinton's peace dividend with the 25-30% cuts.
Senator McCain asks Huckabee about Fair Tax. It's a very popular idea with a groundswell. How to answer the criticism that a sales tax won't cause low-income Americans to bear more of the burden of the government, and where is the resonance.
Huckabee: people would love the IRS to be abolished. We are penalized for productivity. Fair tax says we want you to be productive and work and profit. On the bottom end, the poor come out best of all because of pre-pay. No taxes on basic necessities of life. No more underground economy. "No more pimps, drug dealers...non-Republicans" avoiding taxes. Wants to put the IRS out of business.
Russert follows up with question about how the people who are only paying fifteen percent now benefit from a thirty-percent sales tax. Huckabee says that it's only 23%, and that he's not considering SSI and other taxes.
Ron Paul asks McCain if there would be more sunshine on who he would rely on for economic advice. Sorry, I missed the full question. I suspect that it had to do with the Tri-Lateral Commission.
Huckabee asking Romney if he supports Brady and "assault weapon" ban. Good question.
Romney says that he supports 2nd Amendment and hopes that the SCOTUS will find it an individual right. He also said that he would sign an assault weapons ban renewal, but doesn't think it necessary. Doesn't support any new legislation, and supports the right to bear arms.
Giuliani asking Romney (after talking about McCain's position) if he supports National Catastrophic Fund for disaster insurance. Romney says that he does support a "back stop" for high-risk states, but doesn't support Iowan's subsidizing Massachusetts or Florida. Doesn't explain how to square the circle.
McCain wants to address the issue, by spreading insurance across state lines, increasing the risk pool. House wanted a bill of $200B with no reform whatsoever. Confident that we can work with the insurance companies and don't need a new federal bureaucracy.
Russert following up with a question about global warming and submerging Florida and why he opposes caps. Giuliani says that we need to go more nuclear, get hybrid vehicles, clean coal with carbon sequestration, incentives for new industries, biofuels. Project like putting a man on the moon to become energy independent. Caps will punish the American economy and let other countries off the hook.
McCain favors cap and trade (with Joe Lieberman--he's forgetting again that he's running for the Republican nomination, not the general election). Repeats one of the climate change canards: "Climate change is real, and can affect states like Florida because it has to do with violent weather as well." "Suppose we are wrong, and hand our children a cleaner world." There is no acknowledgement of the potential costs to the economy.
Russert asking Giuliani what happened to his race. Pretty blunt.
Giuliani compares himself to the Giants, and says he's going to come back from behind.
I have to note that this has been a very mild discussion, really no harsh criticism from anyone.
Williams asks about McCain's mother's quote that the party will have to "hold its nose" to vote for her son. How will he get the support of Republicans? Says that most Republicans are concerned about radical Islamic extremists and that he'll defend the nation. Conservative Republicans are as concerned about climate change as he is. What planet has he been living on? Talking about when he's willing to go after Republicans when he has to do so to put his country above his party.
Romney: how will you run against the team of Hillary and Bill Clinton? Want to elect a president on the basis of the candidate, not her husband. She wants to raise taxes, give everyone health insurance by the government, get out of Iraq as fast as we can. She is Washington to the core, and has been there too long, as has Bill Clinton. Going to do it the Ronald Reagan way of pulling social, economic and national security conservatives. The first time that Reagan's name came up in this debate. Won't report how much of his wealth he's spending until he's legally required to do so. Claims he's raised more money than any other Republican in this race, and he feels obligated to put in his own to match his donors. Though he didn't raise as much as Jon Corzine.
Will a Mormon president have trouble raising support in the country? Romney doesn't believe that the American people are going to base their vote on a man's church. Believes that the Founders didn't intend a religious test, and believes that Americans agree. Hillary takes her inspiration from old Europe, he takes his from a young and vibrant America.
Ron Paul thinks that Social Security should be abolished. Is he still in favor? Yes, but not overnight. Need to get the young people out. He'll take care of all the elderly, but save money by stopping all the expenditure overseas. Doesn't want taxes on their benefits, wants to secure the trust fund, protecting it from general revenues. It's a failure, doesn't work, is going to bankrupt the country. Government should have never been involved, and there's not way that benefits are going to keep up. His plan has a better chance than any other one.
Huckabee: what will he do to save Social Security: Wants to comment on Mitt's money in his own campaign. Offers a solution that if he's president, Mitt can have more money to pass on to his sons. In response to the SS question, talking up Fair Tax. Taking a "can do" attitude in response to Russert's question about how unlikely the Fair Tax is.
Will Romney do for Social Security what Reagan did in 1983? "No, I don't want to raise taxes." It has a double whammy. You slow down the economy and more people lose work. Three other ways to solve the problem. Personal accounts for something that does better than government bonds. Calculate the benefits based on the price index rather than wage index. And change age of eligibility. Need to work to come up with a compromise. But doesn't want to scare anyone--nothing will change for anyone in or near retirement, but we have to do something about the thirty and forty year olds.
Why is Giuliani's campaign airing an ad in Spanish. Core of his plan is to stop immigration at the border, regardless of language of ads. Have to teach new behavior, which means identify yourself, like other countries. At the end of the day, to be a citizen, you have to speak English.
Why a special policy for "dry-foot" Cubans? Presumption in immigration law that Cubans are fleeing political persecution. Exception has been around for decades, and is justified by Castro's history.
Question for Huckabee. Does he agree with Chuck Norris that McCain is too old? Only agreed with Norris because he was standing next to him. He doesn't think that Senator McCain lacks the vigor and capacity to be president, uses McCain's mother as a vibrant example. Not an issue for him, even if it is for Chuck, but he's far enough away from him he disagrees. McCain threatens (jokingly) to send Sly Stallone after Chuck.
New York Times has endorsed McCain in the New York primary. How will he defend himself? Says that he never did anything that the New York Times suggested, which is why he's a conservative, and shows true compassion.
Romney changes positions with the wind the NYT opposes him. Romney says that he's not in politics to please the New York Times. Defending his record on pro-life positions, taxes, and Second Amendment.
Is McCain's temper an issue? This was one from the LA Times. He doesn't think that he would have the support of his colleagues if that was the case. Saying that he's proud of Giuliani, and that all of the people on the stage with him are great Americans.
In response to someone's comment that Huckabee's faith "gives him a queasy feeling." Huckabee's response is that that's his problem, not Huck's. Have to respect people of all faiths, including no faith.
Concern that Ron Paul won't stick to his party and will run with another party. His concern is that his opponents aren't sticking by their party and its principles. Dances around the question, saying that he doesn't intend to run independently, but he wants them to worry that he will. Not a matter of him leaving the party, they need to welcome people to a party that's becoming smaller. Can't be "too strict with the Constitution." Need a big tent of people who believe in the Constitution. He gets the last word.
I'll be gathering my overall thoughts, but they'll probably be over at Pajamas Media a little later.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 PMHe's going to be #3 on the NYT book list, and he's been nominated for a Pulitzer:
It would be great, not to mention amazing, if he wins one.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:32 PMSo says Robert Bidinotto. Not to mention Sixty Minutes.
But as he notes, too many people are politically and emotionally invested in the myth that the administration lied for reality to have any impact on them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:30 PMLileks has some commentary on the latest display of dhimmitude in the formerly great nation of the United Kingdom.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:15 AMThe judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: "Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?"These are judgments and decisions made by people who, one suspects, have never poked their heads out of the bubble that extends over the entire professional caretaker class. You really have to have multiple years in higher education to craft a statement so packed with radiant stupidity. Is it true that all builders are cowboys? No. The likelihood that 100% of the British construction trades are populated by laconic men wearing chaps, a Stetson and a sidearm is small, and the paucity of actual cowboys in England will probably mitigate against an impressionable child making this inference. Is it true that builders get their work blown down? No. It is also not true that Winnie-The-Pooh is a bear who walks erect and has a kangaroo as a neighbor. It’s called a story. This may come as a grim revelation to people who only read their kids bedtime stories about a Bangladesh seamstress who successfully repays a microloan, but kids like made-up stuff, and can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Which makes them eminently unqualified for a position in a government book-award granting organization. Is it true that all builders are like pigs?”
No. On the other hand, some builders are like pigs, specifically the third pig who chose brick. The story of the Three Little Pigs was a famous Depression-era Disney cartoon that hit a sweet spot in the national mood. Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? In retrospect, that wasn’t really the lesson, since the pigs who sang the song had reason to fear the wolf, due to substandard construction techniques. Does this mean all cowboy pig builders use straw? No. But the third pig, who planned ahead and built for the storm, was able to shelter his feckless brothers when the wolf came, and afterwards everyone could scoff at the wolf. Lesson learned.
Not just me, you also. I may be attempting a software upgrade tonight or tomorrow, and I'll have to shut down access to the site temporarily while I do it. So if you can't get in, that will be why. It's nothing personal. Not even for the trolls. I'll be keeping this post at the top for a while, so until it happens, look below for new ones.
[Wednesday update]
OK, even though (or maybe I should say particularly because) no one can comment yet, I'm going to start blogging again. I just can't get the monkey off my back. New posts will continue to appear below until the issue is resolved, or I give up on it and ban everyone permanently. And again, if there is an MT doctor in the house, please email me.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:14 AMDale Amon has some thoughts, though as I note in comments, Mercury is an unlikely prospect for prospecting.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:27 AMA suicide bomber blew himself up by falling down the stairs.
Well, at least we can be pretty sure that alcohol wasn't involved.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:06 PMOK, amidst my ongoing MT template woes, I want to bring your attention to the nine manliest names in the world. Well, the English-speaking world, anyway. Though some of them are Germanic.
Anyway. I know a man who works (or worked) for British Aerospace named Roger Longstaff. I think that beats most on the list, myself. And it's Anglo-Saxon as all get out.
The post title, of course, is the name that Homer Simpson picked for himself when he decided that he was ashamed of his name (not for anything that he did, though he should have been multiple times over) but when it was used for an embarrassing television character. As he notes, he saw it on a hair dryer.
And yes, I know you're dying to comment on this. I'm working on it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:50 PMApparently, there is no clean path to get from the old version to the new version with the comments template intact. The new version of MT doesn't allow pop-up comments--you have to go to the individual entry page. So I decided that I'd just start with a fresh set of templates that work in the new software, and gradually restore the look of the page. At least we'll be functional. Now that I have a clean setup, the first thing I'll do is get comments working properly again, then I'll start reprettifying the site.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 PMWith Jonah Goldberg, about his new book
There's very little news in Virgin's announcement today, except for the pretty picture and the schedule. Many more questions are left unanswered than answered. There's a little more, but not much more info at the New York Times (registration required). The Times piece has an error, calling SpaceShipTwo SpaceShipOne.
Are they really claiming that they're going to start SS2 flights in June? Or just White Knight 2? And if SS2 flies in June, how many flights will there be with ballast for the propulsion system (i.e., simply drop tests) and at what point will it first fire the rocket motor? I ask because, despite Scaled's fine for not properly training its employees in the handling of nitrous oxide, there has been no announcement as to the cause of last July's accident. Do they know? If not, have they moved forward with engine development anyway? Or have they switched gears and gone to a different propulsion system? Seems like a pretty tight schedule, if so.
I think that they could learn a lot and start test flying the airframe this summer, assuming it's well enough along, and perhaps they're betting on the come when it comes to the powerplant to meet that schedule. Finally, I wonder what Burt thinks about the announcement?
Jeff Foust has more thoughts. The dual cabin design of WK2 is interesting. I wonder if that's for additional passenger revenue?
[Update a little later]
A lot of posts and links over at Clark Lindsey's place (not a permalink).
[Update at 5 PM EST]
Alan Boyle has more details, with some comments from Virgin. But none on propulsion. As I suspected, the initial flights for SS2 will be drop tests (naturally), which can go forward without engines.
And Alan has pretty mixed response from his commenters, some of whom sound like morons. At least I don't have to worry about that until I get my comments fixed, which is turning out to be a much bigger deal than I thought it would. Again, if there's an MT doctor in the house, email me at the address in the upper left corner.
[Evening update]
Clark Lindsey has more info. As I was guessing, the flight tests this summer will be WK2, not SS2, and Burt still says they don't know what happened or what they'll do about propulsion. That's not good if they want to be in operations in '09. He surely must have some options in mind. I'd recommend going with a liquid, from XCOR or someone else, and dumping the hybrid, which adds ops cost, and whose safety is overrated. But we'll see.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:58 AMThis is a test post...
[Update an hour or so later]
OK, I'm in MT 4.0, but having problems. Still no comments showing up, and I can see that they've changed their template comment tags again (no mention about this in the upgrade instructions), so I'm glad that I didn't waste my time trying to fix it in 3.35. More seriously, the script is crashing when I publish with no helpful messages, though it does seem to publish, so I'm going to have to dig through the server logs. I'm not very comfortable moving forward until I understand/fix that problem. If there are any MT gurus out there, I'd appreciate an email.
[Late morning update]
OK, I've got a semi-serious problem. When it updated my data bases, it made me an administrator for the blog, for not for the MT installation itself (even though I was previously). Comments are disabled at the system level, and I don't have permission to go in and change this. Does anyone know how to hack the installation on the server to change my MT permissions? I'm thinking that maybe if I go in and modify the database directly, but I'll probably have to delve pretty deeply into the MT docs (or even look at the code) to figure out how to do this.
[Update early afternoon]
Well, I made myself a superuser again by poking around in the data base, and I updated the global permissions. Supposedly now, comments are allowed. But the template continues to refuse to display them. The MT documentation is decidedly unhelpful. I'll have to try to find some working examples and see what I'm doing wrong. So comments will still be unavailable, for now. But I'm going to resume blogging, because there's lots of news out there.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Well, at least I found a relevant manual page, with an example. Hopefully this will get comments on the way to wellville.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:39 AMI've done an upgrade, but there are some issues, as you can see. There are no comments.
I don't think that the comments have been lost, and my data bases are backed up, but I may have to tinker with templates to get things working again.
[Update a while later]
OK, I've got the templates to display the comment field, but it's still not showing the comments. As I said, I'm sure I haven't lost them, and I can reupload them if necessary, but I may not get them viewable until tomorrow. And I'm only halfway through the upgrade (it's a two-step process to get from MT 2.66 to MT 4.0). You can comment if you want, but it won't show up until I fix this problem, whatever it is.
[Update a minute later]
OK, I know the comments exist, because I can see them from my control panel for each post. I just have to figure out what type of incantations I have to perform to make them actually display on the blog.
[Morning update]
I've decided that, if I have to rework templates and debug anyway, I might as well go all the way to the 4.0 upgrade first, to spare myself potentially having to do it twice. Hopefully I'll be through this fresh hell sometime today.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:28 PMThis provides a big opening for Huckabee in the south. He may pull votes that would have otherwise gone to Thompson because they don't want to vote for a northeasterner or McCain.
Let's hope it's not enough to give him enough delegates to make a difference. That's one of the reasons I wanted Thompson to stay in, at least through super Tuesday.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:54 PMA long and fascinating article on a revolutionary technology.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:38 AMSome people never learn. Unfortunately, the comments don't apply just to Hillary, but to Democrats in general. And even more unfortunately, to far too many Republicans and so-called conservatives as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:48 AMBob Krumm is doing one final fund raiser to keep Thompson in the race.
[Update at 2:30 PM Eastern]
He's out:
"Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people."
Not a surprise, but disappointing nonetheless.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:39 AMHere are some thoughts from someone who is thinking like me:
Fred Thompson would appear to still have an opening, however small, in this race. McCain is on the rise in this race but he has not sewn it up by any means.Romney has the money, the delegates and now the poll numbers in Florida to make a race of this. If Fred Thompson leaves the race now, in its still very fluid form, not only does he embolden McCains challengers, he robs himself of the opportunity to be power broker or possibly a consensus candidate at a Republican National Convention.
With the exceptions of Huckabee and McCain, I want to see everyone stay in the race as long as possible, if Thompson can't get enough momentum to win it before the convention. In the hypothetical, I think that Huckabee's voters go to Thompson, and McCain's go to Giuliani, but Thompson will get his share as well. Particularly if he gets McCain's endorsement.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:52 PMOrder your posters, and support the Media Violence Project.
They need our help. It's time to get them the treatment they need and deserve.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:09 AMThe cookie that sounded like a rocket fuel is no more:
"...for those of you who say, 'Get over it, it's only a cookie,' you have not lived until you have tasted a Hydrox."
I never liked either of them that much, myself. But when I ate them, I ate them. I didn't lick the filling off.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:02 AMDerek Lowe is more hopeful than many of his colleagues.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:21 AMA campaign to save XP. Though I'm still using Windows 2000, myself.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:28 AMHe can't get votes other than from evangelicals. Good.
The question is, how long will he carry on? Unfortunately, it looks like he will go on for a while, because he seems to be having a good time, and he'll probably continue to get funding from his own base.
One of the reasons that Thompson should stay in the race is that so many others are. As long as he persists (and if he can continue the momentum that he was starting to build out of South Carolina) he may be able to pick up enough delegates to have a seat at the table in Minneapolis (and an outside shot at becoming a consensus nominee). And he has to continue to pull conservative votes from Huckabee.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:02 AMWise words that many have forgotten. I'm sure that the anti-Zionist left will just think he's an uppity negro, though.
[Update a few minutes later]
To commemorate the holiday, Alan Boyle has some useful links on the scientific bases (or not) of race. I agree that it's much more a social construct than a scientific one.
[Mid-morning update]
An apt thought, that applies to fans of Mike Huckabee as well:
Identity politics is bad news. Today seems like a perfect day to reflect on that.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AM
If Green Bay had won, the Super Bowl would have been one of the historic games in NFL history. We would have seen a team that was attempting to go undefeated throughout the season, with a hot-shot young quarterback, against the old man who led his team to the ultimate game, and was looking to a final win and retirement on a high note.
Unfortunately, it will now be just the former. No one outside of New York will care if the Giants win. It's too bad for Eli Manning and his team, but now most of the nation will be cheering against them, because there's no compelling story on the other side.
And poor Favre. He has to decide if he wants to take one more shot. As I was watching that game, it looked to me like the foremost thought of the players on both sides was, "Damn. Goddamn this is cold. When will this [bleeping] game be over?"
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:25 PMThe Federalist Party is not currently in use.
[Update on Monday night]
Link seems to be broken, and Bill Quick's site seems to have problems in general. anyway, here's a new related follow-up post. I'll try to update with more at a new post as things develop, but basically, the idea was to found a new party based on small government, since the Republicans no longer seem interested in it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:22 PMRegardless of the outcome of today's primary, Fred Thompson says that he's going on to Florida.
Why not? Unless he seriously underperforms the polls tonight, he's still got a significant amount of support, given that the winner is unlikely to even get a third of the vote. When people drop out for various reasons, their votes have to go somewhere. Where will Huckabee's voters go? Where will McCain's, if the only reason to vote for him is his Vietnam record and the war and they ignore his other positions? Not Huck. Probably not Romney. Though Rudy is a possibility. I don't think that this race will be anywhere close to settled this weekend.
There are a lot of people who will continue to send money to Fred as long as they think he has a chance. And there's still a non-zero possibility that this thing could go all the way to Minneapolis with no clear winner, which means that in a brokered convention, Thompson could have an edge. If this is true, and he remains in, I might even put up a Thompson sign on my lawn in Boca Raton.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:06 PM...by identity politics:
The union's rank and file, the panelist explained, features a very large Hispanic contingent and there was simply no way this bloc was going to support a black candidate, no matter what the union's leadership urged.I remember thinking at the time how extraordinary this admission was, and how nuts the media would have gone if it had been uttered by a Republican voter. Instead, one black member of the focus group made what seemed a pretty half-hearted retort (really, a mild press for more of an explanation from the Hispanic panelist, if I'm remembering this right) before Luntz, looking uncomfortable (though maybe I'm projecting) cut the discussion off quickly and threw the coverage back to the Fox studio, where no one seemed anxious to wade into the matter.
It was remarkable to see members of the Party that lives and breaths racial and ethnic bean-counting slough this off as if it were just a fact of life. And maybe it is.
I continue to find the ongoing crack-up of the race/gender-obsessed Democrats fascinating. And I confess to no little amount of schadenfreude.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:48 PMRomney did better among more conservative voters, while McCain and Paul each got about one in five moderates, who made up about 20 percent of the electorate.
OK, what kind of a "moderate" would vote for Ron Paul? I can't think of any position that he takes that could be considered "moderate." He's what most people would call an extremist*. If someone called themselves a "moderate," or someone whom the AP would call a "moderate" would vote for Ron Paul then the word has no meaning whatsoever.
And frankly, I find people who call themselves "moderate" to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever. All it really means is that they are neither "liberal" or conservative, so the media types find them difficult to pigeonhole. And given the large number of possibilities of positions one can have without being in either of those media pigeonholes, that means that we can't draw any conclusions whatsoever about them. We need a different word for such people than "moderate."
* Not that there's anything wrong with that--so am I, on many issues. I'm just (as I think that Glenn Reynolds once said of himself) an eclectic one.
I didn't want to leave California, which I consider my real home state, though I was raised and spent the first quarter century of my life in Michigan. But I also have mixed feelings about moving back. Victor Davis Hanson, a true native, explains why:
At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world's richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospaceand serially managed to turn all of that into the nation's largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.
He understates the tourist industry, or at least the beauty of the place. There's a lot more than Carmel to Yosemite.
I weep.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:01 PMOK, CalOSHA has fined Scaled Composites for not training its employees properly in the handling of nitrous oxide. But there's still no explanation of what caused the explosion, or really, how to prevent it in the future. At least, not in this story.
This can't be good news for the SS1 propulsion system.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:13 PMThe Wikipedia entry on the title of this post is pretty minimal. I think that it could be usefully expanded and improved by pointing out this creature as a prominent example.
I expect too-frequent commenter "Jim Harris" to be along to defend him any minute.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:33 PMHe spooged on their dress? He suborned perjury from them? He got Vernon Jordan to offer them a job with Revlon? What?
Obama's racist black minister says that Bill Clinton (the first black president) gave blacks the Monica treatment:
Man should not put limits on what God can do, but that's what people always do, he told the crowd. Just as God made five loaves and two fishes feed thousands, God has provided liberators for blacks in the past - from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and now Barack Obama. But, Wright said, there were always reasons not to follow them.Some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton "because her husband was good to us," he continued.
"That's not true," he thundered. "He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."
I eagerly await further elaboration.
I'm going to run out of popcorn, watching the so-called "progressives" finally immolating themselves in their vile identity politics.
Hard to say what the effect will be, but reportedly, the day before the election, Rush Limbaugh has broken with precedent and, to all extents and purposes, endorsed a candidate in a Republican Primary:
Right after Rush finished the football segment, he popped in, out of reference or context, and read the best parts of the Human Events endorsement of Fred! I was sick in bed and heard it. He ended with asking the South Carolinians to seriously consider voting Fred Thompson if they believe in conservatism, and then went for the commercial.
Will it help? Hard to see how it can hurt.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:55 PMBecause he didn't get rid of people like this a lot sooner. I hope that the next president, if a Republican, does a better job of controlling his own bureaucracy. If a Democrat, they won't need to.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:34 PMA few months ago, T. M. Lutas made a bold prediction in the comments section of one of my blog posts:
Out of the 18 Iraqi provinces, 3 kurdish ones have their greatest security threats being foreign incursion from Turkey and Iran. Terrorism is successfully kept out. 4 arab provinces are under local management and we rarely, if ever, do anything there. That's 7 down, 11 to go with the rest of the provinces in various stages along the road towards handover. I fully expect that when the balance is 10:8 instead of 7:11 that we're going to see a sea change in coverage because "a majority of Iraq is under local control and relatively quiet" and all the MSM is going to realize that if they don't get on the right side of this quickly, the deluge of broken credibility will very likely worsen and shorten their personal careers significantly.I expect at least 3 more provinces to get handed over between now and the height of campaign season 2008. I'd like to think that at least 6 more would make the transition by then (obviating the need to explain Kurdistan's special situation in the stats). The defeatists have to change the natural progression of Iraqi government and security institution building and do it soon or they're going to be in deep trouble in 2008.
Well, he called it right.
Iraq's army and police could be ready to take over security in all 18 provinces by the end of this year as the U.S. military moves toward a less prominent role in the country, U.S. officials said on Thursday."We look at it every month. We make recommendations. I think that if we continue along the path we're on now, we'll be able to do that by the end of 2008," Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the No. 2 commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said when asked when Iraqi forces could take the lead in all provinces.
Harry and Nancy are no doubt very disappointed, since we refused to surrender to the enemy as they were demanding all last year.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:17 PMIowahawk has stolen my schtick:
Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence of that America's newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters? Answers are elusive, but the ever-increasing toll of violent crimes committed by journalists has led some experts to warn that without programs for intensive mental health care, the nation faces a potential bloodbath at the hands of psychopathic media vets."These people could snap at any minute," says James Treacher of the Treacher Institute for Journalist Studies. "We need to get them the help and medication they need before it's too late."
I think that we need to set up a national data base so we can know whether or not one lives in our neighborhood. Anyway, we know that the brutality of covering a war that's being inexplicably won can cause many to snap.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:09 AM...that caused the apparently contemporaneous development of agriculture on opposite sides of the world?
...fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old. I dont want to play the early button game, he said, but the temporal gap between the Old and New World, in terms of a first pulse toward civilization, is beginning to close.
Let's see if they find a monolith.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:19 AMWe're still not approaching "peak oil":
A landmark study of more than 800 oilfields by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) has concluded that rates of decline are only 4.5 per cent a year, almost half the rate previously believed, leading the consultancy to conclude that oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.Peter Jackson, the report's author, said: We will be able to grow supply to well over 100million barrels per day by 2017. Current world oil output is in the region of 85million barrels a day.
The optimistic view of the world's oil resource was also given support by BP's chief economist, Peter Davies, who dismissed theories of Peak Oil as fallacious. Instead, he gave warning that world oil production would peak as demand weakened, because of political constraints, including taxation and government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
That would imply falling prices, to me. I stand by my prediction that oil will never be sustained for long at its current price levels (adjusting for inflation and exchange rates).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:42 AMRalph Peters is less than impressed (to put it gently) with the New York Times and its apparent war against veterans:
in the Middle Ages, lepers had to carry bells on pain of death to warn the uninfected they were coming. One suspects that the Times would like our military veterans to do the same.The purpose of Sunday's instantly notorious feature "alerting" the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as "unclean" - as the new lepers who can't be trusted amid uninfected Americans.
Anyone want to make book on whether there's anything resembling even a recognition of how egregious this was (forget about an actual apology) from the "public editor"?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:59 AMLileks has thoughts on the continuing slide of the Brits into a multi-culti PC hell:
"Pc Mahmood believes it was 'not meant in a malicious way, just a bit of banter'. He told a sergeant, who was 'really disgusted', that he knew it was meant as a joke and did not want to make a formal complaint.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:54 AM'I just took it on the chin. But someone else in the room must have thought it was a racist incident, and reported it,' the officer said."
So the officer who got the gift wasnt offended. Everyone else in the room thought it was below the belt as well, and didnt hoot at the Mooselman and shout porky porky porky, whos got the porky now, wot? But the people who had nothing to do with the event were offended on the fellows behalf, and that was it.
Orwell was slightly mistaken: the future is a boot, stomping on a joke.
I have often been accused of being "lazy." Even by people who I know and love. Even, on occasion, by myself.
But what was the basis for the accusation?
Apparently, that I am not continually busy. That I often indulge in the very effective technique of "management by procrastination." That I often do what needs to be done without breaking a sweat, and while waiting until the last minute to do it.
Once, in college (in the dark ages prior to word processors), I wrote a term paper, that I had known was due for many weeks, due the next day at the end of the semester, in an all-nighter, on a manual typewriter, with no notes, no citations, no...nothing. I had just been thinking about the subject for weeks, and the night before it was due, I sat down, and knocked out a twelve-page typewritten paper, with minor erasures, in a night. I got an A minus.
So I have mixed feelings when I hear that Fred Thompson is "lazy."
Now, I don't think that Fred Thompson is lazy. I just think that, despite the southern drawl, which many (mistakenly, as anyone who has worked with smart NASA employees and contractors in Houston, Huntsville and the Cape would know) think is a mark of a slow mentality, that he works smart, and cheap. Robert Heinlein once wrote that: "Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."
I believe that.
I don't want a president, or a presidential candidate, who is frenetically scurrying around, appearing to be doing something, particularly two years before the swearing in. If he's really a conservative (as he claims to be, though I'm not necessarily), I'm perfectly happy with a president who, when demanded to do something, just stands there. And as a libertarian, opposed to big government, I'm happy to have a president who will think before acting, and who believes that the first instinct should not be to pass yet another federal law.
I'm actually quite pleased with Fred Thompson's campaign style to date. It saddens me that so many others, who would be otherwise disposed to vote for him, are not. I'm saddened that they think that he needs to stoke a "fire in the belly," rather than simply employ the minimum resources needed to win the election. You would think that the warm-mongers would be pleased at Fred's lack of energy and want to vote for him, to help save the planet. As an engineer, I'm extremely impressed with his efficiency. As a result, it's very frustrating to know that, if everyone who would vote for him "if he only had a chance" would actually vote for him, that he'd have a chance. It's kind of the reverse of Yogi Berra's old saying that "no one goes downtown any more; it's too crowded."
So here's where the mixed feelings come in. As an engineer, one needs margins. I'm concerned that he cut it a little too close. I'm afraid that in waiting just a little too long to get in, and in waiting just a little too long to finally go after the Elmer Gantrys and other pretenders to Republicanism and conservatism, that he's just missed the boat.
Despite this fear, I will continue to support him, and hope that I'm wrong, into South Carolina and beyond. Because if so, he will prove to be the most parsimonious president in American history. And I think we could use not just a little, but a lot of that right now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:16 PMFrom Tim Noah:
It was 10 years ago on Jan. 12 that Linda Tripp notified Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's office that she had audiotapes of Monica Lewinsky telling her that she'd had an affair with President Bill Clinton, and that he'd urged her to lie if asked about it under oath.
Hint for the terminally clueless. This wasn't "getting a BJ." It wasn't "lying about getting a BJ." As clearly stated by Noah, it's called suborning perjury, in order to prevent a vulnerable young woman from getting a fair trial in a civil suit under a law that the suborner had signed with his own pen. Not to mention bribing and/or intimidating a witness to perjure herself, which is a more egregious instance of same.
Maybe I'm weird, but it seems very hard to reconcile that with upholding an oath to see the nation's laws faithfully obeyed. King William didn't think that the law should apply to him, either when in Arkansas when he allegedly raped a woman as the state Attorney General, or as President of the United States.
That was what the Lewinsky scandal was about.
And when considering whether or not to elect his wife, who helped orchestrate the attacks on the women that he wronged, to the highest office in the land, that is something to be considered. Particularly if one considers oneself to be a feminist.
I would also point out to Mr. Noah that, there is one person who, throughout, told the truth in this affair, and was never caught out in a lie, or lack of probity, despite all the attacks on her weight, her looks, or her "infidelity" to the "friend" who asked her to commit perjury. Her name was Linda Tripp.
And his comments about Jonah Goldberg are pathetic. If he doesn't like the idea of the book
ESMD has finally responded to Keith Cowing's questions to NASA PAO.
One bit of explanation is required, I think. When Keith refers to a "five-by-five" matrix, he's talking about the standard risk assessment tool that NASA (and ARES Corporation, for whom I casually consult, and others) use to track program risk.
Here's an example from the Mil Standard, but it's a five by four (five levels of probability, four levels of consequence). Anything that is in one corner (low likelihood, low consequence) can be ignored, and anything that is in the opposite corner (high for both) should be receiving the bulk of the program resources. Things that are in between are tracked, and measures are taken to move them down to the 1,1 corner of the matrix. Though I can't find an example of one at my fingertips, the five by five is a little more fine grained in consequence level.
It can be used either for safety issues (in which case, "catastrophic" corresponds to loss of mission or crew), or for programmatic issues, in which case "catastrophic" would probably be complete program failure. It's a little harder to evaluate in this case, though, because that depends on how "program failure" is defined. Does it mean that the program is cancelled? Or does it mean that the program is restructured beyond recognition? Ares 1 seems to me to be vulnerable to either one.
What exactly is the issue? The problem is that any structure has a resonant frequency at which it naturally vibrates. If you excite the structure at that frequency, you can develop a positive-feedback system that will literally shake it apart (the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is the classic example).
Solid rocket motors don't run particularly smoothly (compared to well-designed or even poorly designed liquids) and large solid motors provide a very rough ride. Everyone who has ever ridden the Shuttle to orbit has commented on how much smoother the ride gets after staging the SRBs.
Now, one way to mitigate this is to damp it out with a large mass. The Shuttle does this by its nature, because even though it has two of the things, they are not directly attached to the orbiter--they are attached to a large external tank with one and a half million pounds of liquid propellants in it, and it can absorb a lot of the vibration. Moreover, the large mass has a frequency that doesn't resonate with the vibration.
As I understand it (and I could be wrong, and I'm not working Ares, but this is based on discussions, many off the record and all on background with insiders on the program), there is a very real concern that the upper stage on top of the SRB in "the Stick" will be excited at a resonant frequency, but that even if not, the stage will be too small to damp the vibrations of the huge SRB below.
If this is the case, there is no simple solution. You can't arbitrarily change the mass of the upper stage--that is determined by the mission requirement. Any solution is going to involve damping systems independent of the basic structure that are sure to add weight to a launch vehicle that is already, according to most reports, underperforming. Or it will involve beefing up the structure of the upper stage and the Orion itself so that they can sustain the acoustic vibration loads. In the case of the latter, it is already overweight, with low margins.
So this constitutes a major program risk, that could result in either cancellation, or a complete redesign (that no longer represents the original concept, because the problem is fundamentally intrinsic to it).
Now, let's take apart the response a little:
Thrust oscillation is...a risk. It is being reviewed, and a mitigation plan is being developed. NASA is committed to resolve this issue prior to the Ares I Project's preliminary design review, currently scheduled for late 2008.
The problem is that NASA can "commit" to resolve it until the cows come home, but if it's not resolvable, it's not resolvable. They can't rescind the laws of physics, and we're approaching a couple of anniversaries of times when they attempted to do that, with tragic results.
Now this next part is (to put it mildly) annoying:
NASA has given careful consideration to many different launch concepts (shuttle-derived, evolved expendable launch vehicle, etc.) over several years. This activity culminated with release of the Exploration Systems Architecture Study in 2005. Since then, the baseline architecture has been improved to decrease life cycle costs significantly.NASA's analysis backs up the fact that the Ares family enables the safest, least expensive launch architecture to meet requirements for missions to the International Space Station, the moon and Mars. NASA is not contemplating alternatives to the current approach.
The problem is that NASA didn't give "careful consideration" to the previous analyses after Mike Griffin came in. As far as can be determined, all of the analysis performed under Admiral Steidle's multiple CE&R contracts, performed by major contractors, was ignored, and put on the shelf to collect dust while NASA decided to build what the new administrator, along with Scott Horowitz and Doug Stanley, were predisposed to build. I have never seen "NASA's analysis" that supports this statement. Steve Cook made a valiant attempt to justify it at the Space Access Meeting last March, and was given kudos, at least by me, for having the guts to come in and defend it to a hostile audience, but no one was convinced, or even saw convincing data. He simply stated the conclusions, but didn't show the numbers.
But the most troubling thing to me is the end:
Thrust oscillation is a new engineering challenge to the developers of Ares - but a challenge very similar to many NASA encountered during the Apollo Program and development of the space shuttle. Every time NASA faces an engineering challenge - and it faces many - agency engineers examine all the options for addressing the issue. NASA has an excellent track record of resolving technical challenges. NASA is confident it will solve this one as well.
The problem is that, in reality, despite its confidence (or at least its stated confidence) NASA's record on this score is, at best, mixed. For instance, think about (as just two examples) the X-33. Or the OMV (I did a Google on it, and couldn't come up with any good histories of it--one needs to be written). Or many of the original space station concepts, which required complete redesigns. Sometimes engineering challenges are just too great to overcome, and a new approach is required to overcome a flawed concept. I don't know whether that's the case with Ares 1 or not, but this response doesn't instill in me any confidence that it's not.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:02 PMTo paraphrase Euripides, those whom the modern-day gods would destroy, they first give too much oil and power.
We have today two stories of oil-fueled despots in alliance. First, Iran's Ahmadinejad's economic illiteracy is coming home to roost:
Ahmadinejad, with his peculiar and literal belief that he has divine backing, was not inhibited by this record of prudence. With a total oil revenue in the first two years of his presidency of $120 billion (61billion) more than Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had in his eight years as President the administration still found it necessary to deplete the emergency oil reserve fund set up by Ahmadinejad's presidential predecessor, Mohammed Khatami. According to the Iranian central bank he took $35.3 billion from the fund in his first year and $43 billion in his second year, as a new book, Ahmadinejad, by Kasra Naji, records.Nor is it easy to work out what Ahmadinejad has spent it on, because he has channelled much of it through religious foundations and to contracts of his own nomination rather than leaving it under the control of ministers and elected parliamentarians. But the predictable result of the spending was inflation, rising from 12 to 19 per cent. Many were put out of work by his sudden decision to raise the minimum wage by nearly half. The climax of this spectacle was the petrol rationing announced so suddenly on June 27, 2007, that motorists could not complete their journeys. For the fourth-largest exporter of oil in the world, that is a humiliation. In the run-up to the March elections to the parliament, the Majlis, there have been signs of a rift between Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme religious leader. The President's critics, once silenced, are now allowed full voice. MPs say openly that the real jobless figure is near 20, not 10, per cent.
Emphasis mine. Presumably, this is earmarking, Tehran style. In any event, divine will or not, he may be on his way out. Meanwhile, over in the western hemisphere, Hugo is losing his support among the poor, his key constituency, as a result of high crime rates and potholes:
Ninety percent of Venezuelans believe Chavez is doing too little to catch criminals, according to a report by pollster Datanalisis in the El Nacional newspaper this month.Half the population was a victim of crime between 2006 and 2007, making Venezuela the most crime-ridden nation in the Americas, the Latinobarometro survey group says.
"The government is in a severely tight spot," said Edgardo Lander, a sociologist at the Venezuelan Central University. "It could face an electoral catastrophe if there aren't signs of change by the middle of the year."
The common denominator is the black gold that provides far too much wealth and power to those unfit for it. The dictators may go away, but there's no guarantee that those who replace them will be any better as long as this moral hazard continues to exist. Ideally, nation's oil wealth and revenue would be privatized, perhaps by distributing stock to the citizenry. But that would require a real revolution, which is the last thing that these faux revolutionaries want.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:02 AMSince Drudge broke the story of Clinton's intern, that Newsweek had been sitting on.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:24 AMMichael Shermer, who has a new book out
[Update a little after noon]
More evolutionary psychology: why the pill has reduced the need of men to marry.
I've often pointed out that the people who really change society are not the politicians and ideologues, but the engineers.
[Update in the afternoon]
I thin that the first article provides a good example of why, despite their irrationality, socialism and wealth redistribution schemes are so intrinsically appealing to so many, and why they won't die out, despite their manifest empirical failures. Too many people would prefer that everyone be poor than that a lot are wealthy while a few are superwealthy. Which is sort of depressing, because it means that the ideological wars over this will go on as long as human nature remains what it is.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:58 AMJeff Manber writes that we should be inviting China to participate in the ISS program, and space in general.
I have a hard time getting worked up about it, either way. I don't consider either NASA or China relevant to the future of space at this point, though if they actually start flying this thing, I may start to take them more seriously.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:24 AMI'd love to get a transcript. I hope that Team Thompson was listening to Elmer GantryMike Huckabee's Michigan concession speech in South Carolina, because the mendacity in it will be fodder for several campaign commercials this week. The man who wants a federal smoking ban wants government to leave us alone?
Please.
[Update]
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has reversed his position on a federal ban aimed at workplace smoking and now believes the issue should be addressed by state and local governments.The about-face is apparent in a Huckabee campaign statement, sent to The Hill Tuesday evening in response to questions about the smoking ban proposal. It clashes with the stance Huckabee has taken during his race for the White House and with his record as governor of Arkansas, when he signed into law a measure prohibiting smoking in most indoor public places.
Must be pre-emptive against the inevitable ads in SC. Maybe they should just be pictures of flip flops...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 PMThis would seem to be an indicator of the civil war that is brewing in the Democrat Party, and it's not just the long-overdue (and delicious) class identity war between blacks and women. It's about a lot of Democrats finally, at long last, getting fed up and frustrated with the Clintons.
What happened in Michigan is not very different from what used to happen in the old Soviet Union, Riegle said. The Clinton machine manipulated the ballot. They dont care how they win, only that they do. Its wrong and people need to know that.Riegle said the Democratic candidates had an understanding, after Michigan defied the party and tried to become the first state to hold a primary, that none of them would compete in Michigan. Obama and Edwards honored the agreement, but Clinton did not and put her name on the ballot, he said.
People should not permit the Clintonsboth Bill and Hillaryto have an unfair advantage in Michigan, said Riegle.
Full disclosure: I used to deliver Don Riegle's Detroit Free Press (he lived a block away from me) and occasionally even collected payment from him at the door, and some of my grammar-school classmates worked on his first congressional campaign. But I gave up on him politically within a term or three of his congressional career (when he switched from Republican to Dem, and I was becoming a libertarian). He later (thankfully and appropriately) resigned as one of the five Senators in the Keating scandal that caused John McCain (one of the others) to go to war with the First Amendment. I agree with him on very little, politically, but if he's finally trying to flush the Clintons from his party, I'll cheer him on.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:37 PMFirst it was Ezra Levant in the Great White North (not a permalink--for readers from the future, go search the archives of early January, 2008), and now it's Janet Albrechtsen, Down Under:
This is not simply a defence of Levant because he is a conservative columnist. Far from it. If a bleeding heart on the Left was dragged before a human rights commission for thinking and saying unpalatable things, even stupid things, the defence would remain the same. Defending the right to say the right things is easy. Defending the right to say the wrong things, even offensive things, is what counts if we are serious about free speech.That's why, some years ago, I wrote in defence of my colleague Phillip Adams when he was accused of racial vilification by an American who was offended by Adams's assertion that the US was one of the most violent nations on earth and was largely to blame for the events of September 11. The comments were daft but Adams has a right to be wrong and so it was important to stand up for his right to say it.
Allowing a state body to investigate it as a speech crime sends a chill down the spine of Western progress. As Levant argued, "Freedom of expression is only meaningful when it trumps other values, such as political sensibilities, or religious dogma, or personal sensitivities. Indeed, Western civilisation's progress in all realms, ranging from science to art, to religion, to feminism, to civil rights for racial minorities and gays, has come about from the free expression of ideas that necessarily offended some earlier order." In short, self-criticism is at the core of the West's progress. The battle of ideas may be no place for the faint-hearted, but it produces exceptional results by thrusting forward the better ideas.
Indeed.
We can tolerate intolerance (as long as the intolerance is peaceful), but the Islamist enemy seemingly cannot. That is one of the (many) irreconcilable differences that make this such a difficult war. And it's a war that's made all the more difficult because they use our own tolerance and freedom against us.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:50 PMClark Lindsey talks some more about Steven Weinberg's space and science budget opinions in reply to my interview of him.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 12:34 PMHarder. Thompson is finally going after McCain. I've been thinking that he was going to hold off on this until after the Michigan primary, but maybe he thinks that's pretty much over now, so he's finally softening him up for the election in South Carolina on Saturday.
And as he says, the notion that he'd go through all this just to be a stalking horse for McCain is indeed "ludicrous."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:18 AMChristopher Hitchens wonders why anyone would want to once again place the ongoing and corrupt soap opera that is the Clintons back at the center of our national politics.
What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter "Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?" in the paperback version of my book >No One Left To Lie To
Poor Bill. All those people always lying about him.
[Update a few minutes later]
Is Obama the new Bill Clinton?
In some of the most unfortunate ways, the Barack Obama phenomenon that swell of adoration that lifted him up in Iowa to practically deposit him in the still-occupied White House is cut frighteningly close to the Clinton mold. In particular, the fetishization of image and lack of conviction are all too familiar. Forget the talk of Bill Clinton having been the first black president. If Barack Obama wins in November we may best understand the coming age by thinking of him as the second President Clinton.I first became suspicious of Obamas charms when I found myself praising the Illinois junior senator without so much as a data points worth of evidence. Unlike Hillary, I heard myself say, Obama at least believes in something. It occurred to me, at once, that I had no sound reason for uttering this. And I was disturbed. The effortless oratory; the vast, glassy smile; the whole kinetic promise of the boy wonder rising Id been suckered.
Not me. Of course, I was always immune to Bill Clinton's supposed charisma as well.
Also pointed out are two key vulnerabilities that a smart Republican (if there is such a thing) could attack:
In this Wednesdays New York Sun, Robert Samuelson singles out Barack Obama for failing to address the coming income transfer from young to old that will leave todays American children overtaxed and underserved. Obama is not alone in having no plan of attack, but as Samuelson observers, The hypocrisy is especially striking in Mr. Obama. He courts the young, promises straight talk, and offers himself as the agent of change. But his conspicuous omissions constitute crooked talk and silently endorse the status quo.But theres much worse. On July 20, 2007, the Associated Press reported Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isnt a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there. Forget the immediate depravity of such a pronouncement. The most disturbing and, not coincidentally, most Clintonesque aspect of the story is that Obamas statement came a week after the New York Times landmark editorial calling for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, genocide notwithstanding. This deference to popular opinion over humanity represents Clintonian moral calculus of a chilling potency.
I continue to believe that a Democrat in the White House next year is by no means a lock, regardless of who the nominee is. People forget that Clinton himself would never have been elected in 1992 without the help of Ross Perot. And he never got a majority of the popular vote.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:52 AMThe 2007 Darwin nominees. Found among a lot of other odd links, including the strangest mating habits of animals.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:03 AMI wish I'd thought of this. He tells Hillary that it took men to give women the vote.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:44 PMSome news from late last week that I'd missed--a previously unheard early recording of The Beatles has been discovered.
This 15 track set was recorded at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany a short while after the Ted Taylor recordings and boast different and perhaps better takes of "A Taste of Honey" and "Hippy Hippy Shake" (using Tony Sheridan as a 5th Beatle). These are the only two songs found on the original Star Club releases with which this recording should not be confused.This is an historical recording because it was the very first time that Ringo Starr actually played with The Beatles "live" after replacing Pete Best on the drums.
Other tracks make good use of Kingsize Taylor's Band "The Dominoes" who utilize their piano on such Beatles favorites as "Money," "Twist and Shout" and "I Saw Her Standing There" all of which were subsequently used on The Beatles' first studio recordings for E.M.I.
What makes this album truly unique are the eight songs not available on any previously released L.P.s or singles -- which include Paul McCartney singing Hank Williams' "Lovesick Blues" and George Harrison vocalizing Maurice Williams' "Do You Believe." One of the most outstanding tracks on this album must be "Ask Me Why" showing just how John Lennon and Paul McCartney became such a winning combination.
Wonder how long until the download is available?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:27 PMI interviewed Steven Weinberg who has replaced James Van Allen as the most prestigious and eloquent direct critic of human spaceflight (unlike Barack Obama who may be the most effective passive-aggressive de-funder of space activities since Nixon).
I faced a fundamental media ethics issue. Weinberg's opinion on the likelihood of nuclear war with Russia in the next twenty years ("more likely than not") puts him in a tiny minority. By publicizing his view on this, it delegitimizes him as a spokesman against human spaceflight without discrediting directly his arguments against human spaceflight on the merits. I chose to carefully transcribe his words on this point, confirm that he stood by them, then released them.
What would you have done?
I certainly owe society a warning if he is correct. Twenty years ago, I would certainly have joined Weinberg in agreeing we are on a nuclear precipice and the facts certainly have not migrated all that much since then, just our interpretation of them. Like the national intelligence estimate of Iran; they are enriching uranium, but maybe they're not trying to build a bomb just today. We compartmentalize and convince ourselves that we're OK.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 07:51 AMFour years ago, President Bush announced a new direction for the nation in space, perhaps the biggest space policy change since the end of Apollo, in that it forthrightly declared that there was now a national goal to send people beyond low earth orbit, where they had been stuck since 1972, a situation that was cemented with the onset of the Shuttle era, because it was our only crewed space vehicle, and it could go nowhere else.
Unfortunately, four years later, the program is bogged down with an unnecessary new launch system that will do little to improve safety and nothing to reduce costs, and for this and other reasons, it seems unlikely to survive the next administration, almost regardless of who wins. My primary hope is that at least the goal remain in place, and perhaps some fresh thought will be given to how it will be best achieved, with a lot more emphasis on the commercial sector and tying it in to national security, as the Aldridge Report advised, and NASA has completely ignored. And no, COTS doesn't count, both because it's inadequately funded, and because it has nothing to do with VSE--it's simply a way to replace Shuttle logistics for ISS.
Jeff Foust has some thoughts over at The Space Review today. Here's what I wrote as I live blogged the speech at the time, from a motel in Lauderdale-By-The-Sea.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:49 AMI'd been wondering about this. Apparently, computer "science" degrees are no longer teaching computer science. There's no doubt that there isn't as much demand for actual CS types as there is for programmers, but if that's the case, they should shrink the CS departments and start up a different one, perhaps called computer applications, to teach the programmers. As it is now, I'd consider it academic fraud.
This is a generic problem, to me. The word "science" has gotten too watered down, even (especially?) in academia. Of course, it all started when someone came up with the oxymoronic major, political science...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:22 AMThat's Joe Katzman's comment at this interesting post by Donald Sensing on a major asteroid impact in North America thirteen thousand years ago.
...the worst consequence of the cataclysm was the mass extinctions of the late Pleistocene that have heretofore been attributed to overhunting by the Clovis peoples of the continent. The extinctions were additionally blamed on the Younger Dryas. The new impact theory, though, says that the comet's multiple explosions (caused by its breakup in the high atmosphere) themselves caused the extinctions: "at least 35 genera of the continent's mammals went extinct including mammoths, mastodons, camels, ground sloths and horses." That's 35 whole genera, not just species, that died out. Just at the time of the extinction the researchers found a significant band of soot in sediments from widely-separated sites.
Let me be the first to blame George Bush.
Evidence continues to accumulate that this sort of thing happens a lot more often that we used to think (particularly considering that thirty years ago few people thought that it ever happened). We're going to feel very stupid if we get hit by one that we could have diverted had we not been so short sighted about becoming spacefaring for the past half century.
Unfortunately, the short sightedness continues, in the form of ESAS. And actually, for that, I do blame George Bush, though I guess he thought that once he hired a rocket scientist to run NASA, he didn't need to think about space any more.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:57 AMThis seems like a pretty big breakthrough.
Using patented microorganisms and transformative bioreactor designs, Coskata ethanol is produced via a unique three-step conversion process that turns virtually any carbon-based feedstockincluding biomass, municipal solid waste, and a variety of agricultural wasteinto ethanol, making production a possibility in almost any geography. The technology is ethanol-specific and enzyme independent, requiring no additional chemicals or pre-treatments.Simply put, the Coskata process can produce ethanol almost anywhere in the world, using practically any renewable source, including feedstock, garbage, old tires and plant waste. And it can do so for less than a dollar per gallon.
I wonder what the equivalent cost per barrel of oil that represents? It seems like it would make sense to convert jet engines at that price, if you can.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:15 AMWould this have happened in a Thompson administration?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:11 AMThanks to Classical Values, I think that Brooks Brothers has found their man...or their...whatever.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:50 PMIs Ron Paul going to have anything to say about this latest incident by his brown shirts?
The assault picked up after lunch. Paul supporters phoning Call claimed to be from the media. Others just yelled, saying she had committed treason, fraud. One person said she should be shot. She received as many as 40 calls that day."One person said he was on a nationally syndicated radio station," Call said, "and he has given out my phone number and they need to call the town of Sutton to find out why there's voter fraud."
The voices came from everywhere. California. Ohio. Florida. Michigan. Very few were from New Hampshire.
He can say that he has no control over his supporters all he wants, but as long as he continues fail to to do a Sister Souljah and denounce this kind of thing, we will continue to conclude that money and political support is more important to him than integrity.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:29 PMA leading proponent of action against global warming says that many of his "green" "allies" are hurting the cause:
He says: "There is a suspicion, and I have that suspicion myself, that a large number of people who label themselves 'green' are actually keen to take us back to the 18th or even the 17th century."He characterises their argument as "let's get away from all the technological gizmos and developments of the 20th century".
"People say 'well, we'll just use less energy.' Come on," he says. "And then there's the real world, where everyone is aspiring to the sort of standard of living that we have, which is based on a large energy consumption."
King calls global warming the biggest challenge our civilisation has ever faced, and famously, in a 2004 article in the journal Science, berated the US for its inaction, describing climate change as "more serious even than the threat of terrorism". But his vocal support for nuclear power and genetically modified foods has led to tensions with environmental campaigners.
No kidding.
They're called "watermelons"--green on the outside, red on the inside. Socialism lost its luster with the fall of the Soviet Union, so they're simply latching on to this latest ideological fad to try to keep it going under a different name.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:45 AMIt's not as bad as "lose"/"loose," but I see quite a few people, including people who write for a living, mistakenly hyphenating "no one," as in "No-one believes that." It looks very strange to my eye, and irritates me. Where does that come from?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:36 AMGlenn at Instapundit points to a UPI story that says JPL thinks the odds of a 4,000 km flyby for 2007 W(M)D5 or less is 99.7%. If it's not going to hit Mars, that increases the chances that it will slingshot around Mars toward Earth. Odds are likely in the 1 in a million range or less, but what if it did? I wouldn't say "probably", but let's have some transplanetary musings!
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 07:45 PMOne would have thought that Canada wouldn't have needed such, but apparently it does, in the form of Ezra Levant.
I wouldn't call it a kangaroo court. Given the locale, more like a moose court. Here's his opening statement. Here is the transcript. Read it and weep (for different reasons, depending on whether you are a proponent, or opponent, of freedom of expression).
I am here at this government interrogation under protest. It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and in this case, religious freedom and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta human rights commission would be the government agency violating my human rights. So I will now call those bureaucrats the commission or the hrc, since to call the commission a human rights commission is to destroy the meaning of those words.I believe that this commission has no proper authority over me. The commission was meant as a low-level, quasi-judicial body to arbitrate squabbles about housing, employment and other matters, where a complainant felt that their race or sex was the reason they were discriminated against. The commission was meant to deal with deeds, not words or ideas. Now the commission, which is funded by a secular government, from the pockets of taxpayers of all backgrounds, is taking it upon itself to be an enforcer of the views of radical Islam. So much for the separation of mosque and state.
Could this be the beginning of the end for the Canadian Human RightsWrongs Commission? Let us hope so.
Mark Steyn has further thoughts, more eloquent (as usual) than mine:
Shirlene McGovern quizzes him on his intent in publishing the cartoons, and another in which she raises the fear that his publishing them could lead to violence against Muslims particularly in todays world post-9/ 11 that has made a number of Muslims more vulnerable to hatred and contempt. Ezra's answer speaks for itself, but Ms McGovern's question reminds me of a passage from Melanie Phillips' book LondonistanMinority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.Ms McGovern, a blandly unexceptional bureaucrat, is a classic example of the syndrome. No "vulnerable" Canadian Muslim has been attacked over the cartoons, but the cartoonists had to go into hiding, and a gang of Muslim youths turned up at their children's grade schools, and Muslim rioters around the world threatened death to anyone who published them, and even managed to kill a few folks who had nothing to do with them. Nonetheless, upon receiving a complaint from a Saudi imam trained at an explicitly infidelophobic academy and who's publicly called for the introduction of sharia in Canada, Shirlene McGovern decides that the purely hypothetical backlash to Muslims takes precedence over any actual backlash against anybody else.
Indeed. More discussion over at Samizdata.
[Update a few minutes later]
I smiled at this: "I hope this goes all the way because the good guys need some high profile wins right now. A little bit of marching in the street wouldn't hurt either, but I don't know if Canadians can overcome their empassioned apathy."
Followed up by, "It is important to note that no one person ever actually "tried" by these "courts" has ever been found innocent.
Canadians...why do you tolerate this?"
C'mon, you hosers. Stand up for freedom, eh?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:19 PMFor those who can't get enough of Fred Thompson, here's the blog for you.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:14 PMMan, teams must hate playing the Packers in the playoffs at home. I just turned on the game, and it looks like half an inch of snow on the field just before the half, and still coming down.
[Going to check Wisconsin radar and weather]
Yup, thirty degrees, and it looks like it's going to keep coming down all game.
I've always thought that it was kind of cool that football doesn't call games for weather. It always made baseball look kind of wimpy when they quit playing in the rain, while the pigskinners will play in a blizzard. But still, you'd think that folks in Green Bay would get tired of it, with almost everyone else indoors now (though I think that Soldier Field is still open, right?). I know that I was happy when the Lions moved into the Superdome in Pontiac.
[Update in the second half]
Wow, the flakes really look more detailed in HD. You can almost tell them apart.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:07 PMI had never noticed this quote on the masthead of USS Neverdock before:
"America is often portrayed as an ignorant, unsophisticated sort of place, full of bible bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based knowledge. I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture..." BBC's Washington correspondent Justin Webb
From an interview with the Grauniad. This explains why some commenters here are both clueless and arrogantly certain in their (lack of) knowledge. I won't name names, but if the shoe fits, they might consider a little more humility.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:48 PMWhat kind of nancy boys does Brooks Brothers think we are? Looks like just the thing for that all-male boarding school, complete with spankings.
Is that price the amount that they'd pay us to wear these abominations? If so, it's nowhere near enough.
[Afternoon update]
And check out this cashmere down vest with the short pants. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. In what kind of weather would one wear that ensemble?
You know, the Brits have a word for people who would wear this stuff. Though I guess we had one of our own, back in the day, the most prominent of whom was called Yankee Doodle.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:24 AM...different flakes. I'm assuming that the exclusion of Fred Thompson (who just got an endorsement from Human Events this morning) was deliberate.
I wonder how much the endorsement will help? I'm sure that it won't hurt, but (though I'm not a regular reader) I suspect that most people who read Human Events in South Carolina were probably going to vote for him anyway.
[Update late morning]
Here's an interesting analysis of why Thompson focused on Huckabee last night, and didn't go after McCain. Hint: it's not because he's trying to help McCain win the nomination.
Meanwhile, Matt Welch, incoming editor of Reason, is making up for lost time in dissecting Dr. No's past.
[Update mid afternoon]
It just occurs to me that we'll know whether or not Krumm's Thompson/McCain theory is valid after the Michigan primary. If he starts to go after McCain in addition to Huckabee after the primary, and before South Carolina, then it will all make sense.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:31 AM...with which I wholeheartedly agree, from Lileks:
On the Hewitt show tonight I was talking about the end result of the administrations overall rhetorical failure, its inability to assert and explain ideas near and/or dear to many who elected him. I think people gave up expecting high fine oratorical flourishes about matters other than the war and the ancillary issues long ago, but it does gall; like the squandered Congressional majority, it was a sign that the thick institutional inertia had filled the vacant crevasses in the domestic agenda. So we get campaign finance reform, and we get an energy bill that will require everyone to switch to bulbs that cost ten times more and require an EPA HAZMAT team to ninja their way through your skylights if you drop a bulb. (Yes, I know, it mandates efficiencies, and if old-style bulbs meet the standards, theyll pass, but given the higher cost of fluorescents and the general planet-friendly rep they have, I expect that a combination of foot-dragging, ad campaigns, somewhat lower prices and improved quality will move people away from incandescents.) I dont think the administration is in the pocket of Big Flourescent; I just think they dont care.Either they figured the logic of their case was self-evident, or saw no short-term gain to making arguments that polled low.
The Middle East? Dont get me started. At the end of the Bush term Syria will run Lebanon, Israel will pressured to concede, Iran will unsanctioned and unbowed. Iraq will work in the end if we care and try and stay, and thats no small thing; thats the big thing, in the end. History wont give a fig about the fluorescent-bulb bill. You could say that second terms always end like this. Clinton, however, would probably have gotten a third term. You could say he was an anomaly, since his appeal was more personal than ideological, and you could say that he didnt spend his time making speeches in his second term defining liberalism for the 21st century. But he didnt have to explain his ideas; they were part of the free-floating cloud of Unexamined Good Things instinctively accepted by the overclass, so he wasnt exactly fighting an uphill battle. Bush had an opportunity to redefine certain ideas as progressive, not retrograde. Really: if the public school paradigm is the status quo, then attempts to upend the Etch-A-Sketch and find new solutions are progressive unless youre one of those blunt-headed types who believe that conservatives (a meaningless term, here) want to destroy unions and punish inner-city schools and funnel public bucks to nuns who prowl the aisles with a ruler, whapping knuckles when anyone mentions Darwin. Rethinking Social Security is progressive, especially if it means giving young people more control over how their forced contributions are invested. Nuclear power is progressive; the status quo, in place for twenty years, still thinks The China Syndrome is a documentary. I know its a different definition of progressive, but heck: redefining progressive is progressive.
As is redefining "liberal
Talk about optimal ad placement.
The ad may have changed by the time you view the AP story (hmmm...checking after posting this...yup, it has), but that was what was there when I grabbed the screen shot. I did not photoshop it, I swear.
And RIP, Sir Edmund. I'm sure that there will be more tears from Hill over the person for whom she was named.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:02 PMWhatever else you think of Ron Paul, it is entertaining to hear the phrase "Austrian theory of the business cycle" in a Republican debate (though it almost sounded like he said "Australian"--"tie me von Mises down, boys..."?)
[Update at 9:26]
Fred takes off the gloves and finally goes after Huckabee for his NEA endorsement and opposition to vouchers. "That's not the position of the Reagan coalition. That's the position of the Democratic Party."
Huckabee's response (paraphrased) boils down to, "well, people reelected me."
Pretty weak tea to make your credentials as a conservative. Lots of Democrats, even very "liberal" ones, get reelected. Fred's job is to draw a distinction between himself and the Huckster as the only true conservative in South Carolina, and so far, I think he's doing well. We'll see if he hits him again.
[Update at 9:42]
Ron Paul is really coming off as the crazy uncle at the holiday dinner, ranting about things that aren't even relevant to the question. Brit Hume: "Congressman, all your fellow candidates agreed with the passive response to the Iranian provocation. Who or what are you responding to?"
[Update afterward]
A memorable phrase from the consensus winner tonight, Fred Thompson, on immigration: "High fences and wide gates."
If anyone is inspired by his performance to send him some money in the wake of his performance, he's looking for it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 PM...when you run into your wife at the local brothel?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:51 PMRick Moran is organizing a blogburst for Fred Thompson, who is putting all his chips on the South Carolina table. He makes a pretty good case as to why his chances may be good for a win there, but he needs money.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:39 PMYou've got to love these latest attacks on Jonah's book
Ezra...credits David Neiwert whose review is exactly the sort of shallow, cliche-ridden, attack-the-messenger stuff that I would expect Ezra to find so persuasive. More on that in a moment. But I find it hilarious that the part Ezra thought sufficiently profound to highlight was, in part, the bit where Neiwert insists that the fascist threat remains on the right and in particular that there's a threat of "totalitarianism" from "dogmatic individualists."
Apparently, to these people, words don't mean things at all.
[Early evening update]
Jonah corrects the record, via an email by Niewert (and per a comment by Duncan Young in comments). Those were Ezra's words, not his. The point remains.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:24 PMA panel of judges of rules that it's against campaign finance laws to advertise a film:
Attorney James Bopp argued that they should be considered "issue- oriented" speech because viewers aren't urged to vote for or against the Democrat."What's the issue?" asked Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a federal appeals judge sitting on a mixed panel to review the case.
"That Hillary Clinton is a European Socialist,' aren't you saying vote against her?"
Bopp disagreed because the movie did not use the word "vote."
"Oh, that's ridic...," Lamberth said, trailing off and ending the line of questioning.
Hey, some people (too darned many, in my opinion) like European socialists. Maybe it was a pro-Hillary ad.
It gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view).
The movie is scheduled for two screenings in theaters, once each in California and Washington. It is also being sold on DVD. Neither of those methods are regulated under campaign laws. The advertisements, however, are scheduled to run during the peak presidential primary season and would be regulated.Bopp, who successfully led a challenge to one aspect of the campaign finance system last year, compared the film to television news programs "Frontline," "Nova," and "60 Minutes." That prompted Lamberth to laugh out loud from the bench.
"You can't compare this to '60 Minutes,'" the judge said. "Did you read this transcript?"
Apparently, the judge missed the "Sixty Minutes" episode in which Dan Rather used fake documents to do a hit job on George Bush six weeks before an election.
The Supreme Court should have thrown the law out in toto. But it looks to me, at a minimum, like they're going to have to at least interpret this (un)Constitutional abomination.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:19 AMEmmett Tyrrell has some thoughts:
The reason for the dramatic decline in Hillary's front-runner status is that Democratic voters increasingly are alarmed about a large hairy monster that has been roaming through their consciences for years, probably since they first heard of Gennifer Flowers and of Bill Clinton's diplomatic negotiations with his draft board. The monster is the Clintons' record of lawlessness and scandal. Already in this campaign cycle, Democratic voters have reminders of the Clintons' unsavory practices, felons among their contributors, even shadowy Asians bundling checks, as in 1996, and, of course, the politics of personal destruction practiced against their opponents.My guess is that a sizable number of Democrats have had enough of it. Obama represents a clean break with a troubled and mediocre past. As Hillary leaves New Hampshire, she challenges Obama on the question of experience. The junior senator from Illinois should take up her challenge. Hillary can chide him for his lack of experience, and he can remind us all of Hillary's unique experiences, beginning with the Clintons' "holiday from history," and Travelgate, Filegate, missing billing records, lying under oath, her cattle-futures bonanza, the Riady family, Johnny Chung, John Huang, Charlie Trie -- and suddenly, you see it, too, the large hairy monster that is the Clinton legacy.
Also, long-time cartoonist nemesis of Bill and Hill, Sean Delonas, is in high form in the wake of New Hampshire. (Note to visitors from the future, not a permalink. Select January 10th, 2008 in the pulldown boxes).
[Update a couple minutes later]
Dr. Sanity has some additional thoughts on the Democrats denial and anger:
Just as Hillary had a neurotic and "forgetful" moment regarding the antics of her husband; what we are witnessing is a supremely neurotic moment on the part of the left, who willy-nilly have jumped the Clinton ship and climbed aboard the Obama "vessel of hope". They are astounded that the antics of the Clintons (which for years they have rationalized and excused) are being used against them. Their idealization of the Clintons had worn thin and, just in the nick of time, along comes a younger, prettier face that can help them shore up those tired, old "progressive" ideas, and delude them into believing they actually are supporting something fresh and innovative.I hate to tell them, but Obama is just another socialist hack. For sure, he's fresh and young and articulate. But his ideas are no fresher than Hillary's and quite a bit more rigid and uncompromising. Hillary and Bill never believed in anything but themselves. Obama comes across as selfless as Mother Theresa, promising to lead us to his utopian wonderland.
What we are witnessing is the neurosis and fickleness of the political left, who just a short time ago adored the Clintons and could bear nothing bad be said about their legacy in the White House.
I still see a lot of potential for a very ugly August in Denver.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Oh, man. I didn't pop the corn soon enough. I didn't expect this until March, at least. They're eating their own:
Obama's national campaign co-chairman, Jesse Jackson Jr., slammed Clinton's now-famous misty-eyed moment by wondering aloud why she didn't shed public tears for victims of Hurricane Katrina, for example."They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs. Clinton did not cry for," Jackson told MSNBC.
And they think that Huckabee is going to split the Republicans? This could be the crackup that finally drives the blacks off the Democrats' liberal plantation. The slave revolt may be finally beginning. The big tent may be falling down around their ears. And the destruction of that coalition that the Clintons started back in the nineties may be finally coming to completion. If so, let's just hope that some new, and better parties arise from the ashes.
[Update a while later]
Dennis Wingo in comments links to Camille psychoanalyzing Hillary today. This may not be just a night, but a year of the long knives.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:10 AMJesse Londin has a roundup. I'd like to go to the one in Arcachon, France.
She also has a year-end space linkfest that I'd missed.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:01 AMChris Matthews says that Obama lost New Hampshire because they're racists up there in the Granite State.
I expected this, but not quite so soon.
If Obama isn't the next president, it will be because of America's inherent racism. And if Hillary! isn't, it will be because of America's inherent sexism. It won't, it goes without saying, be because of any inherent deficiencies in them as candidates that are independent of their melanin content or genital configuration.Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:43 AMAnd it's guaranteed to be one or the other, because only one of them (if either) can win. And of course, if neither of them do, and another Rethuglican steals the election, it will be because we're both racist and sexist. Because, you know, it's always America's fault.
The five genetic experiments most likely to destroy the world. Not sure whether to categorize this as "Technology and Society," or "Humor." So, I'll just go with "Weird."
[Via Cosmic Log]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:02 AMCynical Christian has a post about Huckappeal. But he misses (or at least doesn't elaborate upon) a key point:
What grabbed me were some of Carter's defenses of Mike Huckabee as the real full-spectrum conservative in the race.A prime example of how "economic conservatives" are out of touch with the Reagan conservatives is the issue of executive compensation for poorly managed companies. On CNBC Governor Mike Huckabee expressed his disgust for corporate boards that award CEOs with $200 million bonuses while the workers are taking 40% pay cuts. As the Governor made clear he didnt think the federal government should take action. His only point was merely that as a conservative he would use the bully pulpit to speak out against such outrageous behavior.I think that one thing you have to assume about political candidates is that if that say something is disgusting, they're liable to do something about it. If you're not going to judge what a president will do based on what he says, then stop making me listen to those flippin' state of the union addresses every year. And if a politician tries--or threatens--to mess with how people get paid in the private sector, you can no longer call that politician conservative.
While I agree that that is not a conservative position, it's also misleading. There is a slippery implication here that is extremely non-conservative (or libertarian).
If there really were a corporate governance problem that was resulting in CEOs regularly being overpaid for poor performance, then it might in fact be worthwhile to look into it and see if the government was interfering somehow with the market to allow this to happen (that is, after all, the usual reason for apparent "market failures"). But this isn't even obviously a market failure. Note the insidious assumption: to Huckabee (and Carter), the problem is "corporate boards that award CEOs with $200 million bonuses while the workers are taking 40% pay cuts."
The implication here is that if a company is giving workers 40% pay cuts, it is failing at its job. But it could be that the workers had been overpaid for years, and that the only way to make the company successful at its real purpose (returning value to the shareholders), is to reduce their pay. The assumption is that the purpose of a corporation is not to reward its owners (a base foundation of capitalism), but to provide well-paid jobs for employees. Now one can argue (though not convincingly, at least to me) that that should be the purpose of a corporation, but to do so is one of the farthest things from economic conservatism. It's a ludicrous quote to defend the notion that Huckabee is a conservative. That is classical "liberal" (i.e., non-liberal "progressive") dogma. Democrats say those sorts of things, not Republicans trying to pass as conservative.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:17 PMAll the one-stars at Amazon by people who haven't read Jonah's book
Plus the oftnever-told story of Teddy Roosevelt and Big Meat. You never heard this when you had to read The Jungle
[Update Thursday night]
Since Glenn keeps bumping this link up to the top of Instapundit, some of the newcomers might want to look around at the rest of the blog. Lots of others fun stuff posted over the last couple days.
http://www.transterrestrial.com
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:41 PMAs the comments indicate, this video really is amazing. I don't have the patience for this sort of thing, but I'm always in awe at craftsmen like this. And making vacuum tubes is becoming a lost art. I know that starting in the nineties, some of the more obscure types were available only from Russia. Fortunately, Sylvania and GE continued to make the most common ones.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:06 PMJust when you think you have plumbed the darkest depths of the nation's moral decline, someone comes up with something like this. I weep for my country.
Well, I'm not sure that it's really unethical to not break up the pieces, but it certainly seems to miss the point, unless your only goal is simply to complete the puzzle as quickly as possible. And I've never seen a puzzle that was really worth the end result. With a jigsaw puzzle, isn't the journey the destination?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:53 AMMichael Totten has an interesting discussion with some Iraqis:
According to the conventional narrative, Al Qaeda was rejected by Iraqis because they murdered Iraqis. They were far more vicious and hateful than the Americans they vowed to expel. The narrative is correct, as far as it goes, but Al Qaeda is detested for more than mere thuggery. Other armed groups have been able to maintain at least some popularity even though they also murder Iraqis. None of the others, though, violent though they may be, are so thoroughly totalitarian, so alien to the traditions of Iraqi culture, and so hostile to its centuries-old social fabric. Al Qaeda in Iraq tears at Iraqs traditional culture as viciously as Pol Pots Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia.If you want to understand Al Qaeda in Iraq its methods, its rise, and its fall youll find their story has more in common with the Shining Paths guerrilla and terrorist war in Peru than with the Islamic religion as practiced in the mosques of Fallujah.
Nowadays we can analyze what is going on, Ahmed said. In the Sunni area, in the Western area, we have people being killed by Al Qaeda. The tribes and locals civilians here are standing up to fight the Al Qaeda organization because of that. We have been moving one step forward and two steps backward. We are now only semi-literate people. We need some more education.
Were all the insurgents here Al Qaeda, or were there other organizations also? I said.
The Al Qaeda organization is the major one, said Omar. They made some smaller sub-organizations for themselves to assist them by another name. But, in fact, they are all Al Qaeda.
According to the conventional wisdom, Al Qaeda makes up only a very small part of Iraqs insurgency. Maybe thats true, overall. But I have not been able to find a single person on the ground in Western Iraq not American, and not Iraqi who says anyone other than Al Qaeda has played a significant role in the insurgency.
The conventional "wisdom" is often unwise. Particularly when it's tainted by hatred of George Bush.
[Afternoon update]
This strikes me as particularly timely, given that Harry Reid continues to demand that the US surrender to Al Qaeda (even if he's too stupid to realize that's what he's doing), just as we finally have them on the ropes.
...over the past year nearly 900 brave Americans have been killed while trying to provide Iraqs leaders with the opportunity to unite their country. In that time American taxpayers have spent more than $120 billion to finance another nations civil war and back an Iraqi government that shows little interest in progress. And as President Bush continues to cling stubbornly to his flawed strategy, Al Qaeda only grows stronger.
As Michael Totten reports, this was never much of a civil war, and to the degree that it was, it was being instigated by Al Qaeda, and if Al Qaeda is growing stronger, it certainly isn't in Iraq. But the Senate Majority (non)Leader remains stuck in the 2006 narrative, and out of touch with reality.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:12 AMVirginia Postrel, on Michael Barone, and "change":
I was born in 1960 but remember well the "economic disasters and foreign policy reverses of the 1970s." On my pessimistic days, it worries me that not only voters in general but the young pundit class don't understand how much worse things can be. On my optimistic days, I think the lessons of that period have been largely internalized. After all, you don't hear people proposing wage and price controls. Except on doctors and medicine.
Unfortunately, while I'm generally an optimist about the future, I am a pessimist on the ability of the electorate to be aware of, let alone remember, history. And just as in the nineties, the Obamagasms would indicate that they are clamoring for another vacation from it. Unfortunately, the world often has other plans.
And speaking of remembering history, she also has some thoughts on Ron Paul:
The disclosures are not news to me, nor is the Paul campaign's dismissive reaction a surprise. When you give your political heart to a guy who spends so much time worrying about international bankers, you're not going to get a tolerant cosmopolitan.
Nope.
[Wednesday evening follow up]
Virginia does something rare (if not previously unheard of). She says that her former magazine fell down on the job:
...I was never particularly interested in the Paul campaign, which I considered a fringe effort in both its chances (nil) and much of its rhetoric (too many conspiracies). Rightly or wrongly, I didn't consider Paul "one of the biggest mainstream representatives of libertarian thought." I'm not sure whether I would have written about him if I had. Life is short, I don't make my living as a professional libertarian any more, and I don't feel responsible for commenting on every libertarian-related development that comes along. These days, I am more interested in understanding culture and economics than focusing on policy, much less policing the libertarian movement. Plus, as the Paulites will be quick to note, I disagree with Paul on his sexiest issue, the Iraq war (and on his second sexiest issue, opposition to immigration).I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I'll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn't do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul's newsletters back in the early '90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul's populist appeals.
I agree on the differences that she has with the doctor (in addition to his weird hangers on, which include not just racists and anti-semites, but with his opposition to the war, radical leftists, all the way out to International ANSWER). I just happened to get my dead-tree issue of the magazine a couple days ago, and Ron Paul was the cover story, by Brian Doherty (who, for the record, I generally like both personally and as a writer). I didn't read the whole thing (which I have a tendency to do lately with Reason--I'd prefer more, shorter articles, rather than fewer, in-more-turgid-depth-than-necessary ones--maybe that's something that will change in the incoming Welch era), but I skimmed it, and it did seem to me to gloss over many of the serious issues with him. It also seemed timed to try to boost him in the primaries. I'm assuming that, given the lead time, this was Nick Gillespie's issue, perhaps his last for dead tree before taking over the Reason multi-media gig.
While I complain about living in south Florida a lot, one of the (few, to me) benefits is that Bob Poole and his wife moved out here from LA about the same time we did, and live about half an hour away, so we have the occasional pleasure of an opportunity to get together for dinner. I recall a conversation we had a year or so ago, in which we noted that the war really seems to have split the libertarians (though not necessarily the Libertarians). You could see this in 2004, when there was a roundup of libertarian(ish) viewpoints on who they were going to vote for, and Bob went on record as favoring Bush, contrary to many of his Reason colleagues. Bob, Glenn Reynolds, Virginia (and lowly me) seem to have come down on one side of the divide, and many of our friends (and they really are, as Virginia says) at Reason on the other. But I agree with her that they should have been warning off the younger libertarians who aren't familiar with the history, rather than encouraging them.
It is going to be very interesting to see how this unfolds, and what Ron Paul will do when (despite the fanatical fervor of his supporters) he realizes that he's not going to get the nomination. Will he run as a Libertarian again (as he did in 1988, when I voted for him)? This is problematic, because I think that there are several states that wouldn't allow him to do so after having run as a Republican. And no other party really offers him the prospect of being on a large number of state ballots. Will there be a write-in campaign? Heck, as bizarre as the coalition he's gathered is, he could even run as a member of the Green Party at this point. The thing is, such is the nature of the broad (albeit extreme and eclectic) range of his appeal now that I think he'd likely take more votes from the Dems (particularly if Hillary is the nominee) than the Republicans (depending on who their nominee is, but not that much).
I just think that this is more proof of Jonah's thesis
[Update in the late evening]
Tim Cavanaugh, former Reasonite (and the editor for my dust up with Homer Hickam in October), has some thoughts over at the LA Times. And of course, I should have checked out Hit'n'Run, Reason's group blog, to see what they've been saying about it. Matt Welch, incoming editor of the magazine (and erstwhile LA blogger buddy when I lived there) has a lot of linkage.
[Update a few minutes later]
Following links from Cavanaugh's piece, I found this one to Matt, with more links to a lot more commentary from yesterday, including some of mine (though not this post).
[Update once more]
Nick Gillespie professes shock.
And I don't mean to imply that he's not sincere--I'm sure he is. Virginia's point (and mine) is that if he'd asked some of the older hands around, they probably could have warned him about this, months (or even years) ago.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:23 AMA ninety-year-old woman took down a mountain lion with a twenty two. If she'd been out for a walk, it might have been her own life she was defending, and not just her dog's.
Of course, she did it with one of those evil guns, which some, who think that gun control would work if only we were sufficiently draconian about it, would want to make sure that she doesn't have.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:50 PMJames Carville says that "...I'm not getting back into domestic political consulting. If I do go back, it would be safe to say that I'm the biggest liar in America."
So what else would be new?
Oh. Maybe he means that he'll finally exceed Bill Clinton?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:39 PMAt least for Democrats:
We scanned the transcripts of Saturday's debates hosted by ABC News and tallied up the references to Islamic terrorism. The rhetorical divide between Democrats and Republicans on that score alone ignoring the yawning gaps in policy is stunning.None of the four Democrat presidential candidates despite running for an office that demands they lead the ongoing global war against Islamic extremists could bring himself or herself to define the enemy we face as Islamic.
Their combined references to "Islam" or "Islamic" totaled zero even though moderator Charles Gibson prompted them with a question about "Islamic radicals" threatening the U.S. with nuclear terrorism.
But Democrats refused to go there. Out of respect for their constituency, there was a complete blackout regarding Islamic jihad.
If this continues into the general election, I don't think it's going to help them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:20 PMI didn't note this at the end of the regular season, because it seemed so absurd at the time, but after seeing Michigan pummel Florida in Orlando, one has to wonder now. If Hart and Henne had been healthy in November, could Michigan have gone to the BCS Championship Game? And if so, would they have done better than the Buckeyes did last night?
I know, App State, but hear me out.
Yes, they had two losses, but they were early season losses. Particularly this season, they can be recovered from. Which is worse, losing the first game (barely) to App State, or losing badly to Stanford mid-season?
Before the Wisconsin game, Michigan was ranked 21st in the BCS. Had they beaten Wisconsin, they probably would have ridden up to the second ten, if not top ten. If they beat #5 Ohio State, then they'd certainly end up in the top five, since they only had two losses--their first of the year--and then finished off their season with ten straight wins. After all, on the same day, several teams ahead of them would have lost. With the last losses on the last day of regular season, and with one of the longest win streaks in college football at that point, they could easily have been poised to rise to the top as Ohio State did.
Which would have been amusing, since it would have meant two two-loss teams in the NC game.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:33 PMJames Kirchik has been digging through some of Ron Paul's old newsletters. It's not a pretty sight.
Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first-person, implying that Paul was the author.But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.
I voted for Paul for President in 1988, primarily because I tended to vote Libertarian in the eighties. If these existed at the time, and I'd read some of them, I might not have. Of course, I've never been a big fan of the Von Mises Institute, either.
[Update a few minutes later]
Having read in more detail, let me amend the above from "might not have" to "certainly would not have."
[Update a couple minutes later]
A Ron Paul supporter in deep denial. And as Glenn asks, "Did Paul write this? Was it ghostwritten under his name? Is it better if the answer is the latter?"
[Update late afternoon]
Here's the campaign's response.
I'm willing to believe that he wasn't the author, and even that he didn't endorse the newsletter, but I find it troubling that he let this stuff go out under his own name for so long. The fact that he takes "moral responsibility" for it now is nice, I guess, but it really makes one question his judgment. And his campaign continues to attract many unsavory elements of American politics, including 911 "Truthers," who he seems to be unwilling to denounce.
[Update on Wednesday evening, after an Instalanche]
There was more discussion on this in a post this morning, from Virginia Postrel. There's an update from her there as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:11 PMSt. Charles, MO, is considering banning cussing in bars.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:35 AMIf Obama gets into the White House, will it be due to Jeri Ryan? Just an interesting example of how contingent life can be.
[Update a few minutes later]
In other Obama news, Christopher Hitchens has some thoughts on Obama and race.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:09 AMUnless there's a big change in my finances for the better though, I suspect its a few years off for me. More here.
[Via Instapundit, who has me very envious this week, as he gets to go to the CES for Pop Mechanics]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:42 AM...of Jonah's book
To understand fascism in its full expression requires putting aside Stalin's misrepresentation of the term and also look beyond the Holocaust, and instead return to the period Goldberg terms the "fascist moment," roughly 1910-35. A statist ideology, fascism uses politics as the tool to transform society from atomized individuals into an organic whole. It does so by exalting the state over the individual, expert knowledge over democracy, enforced consensus over debate, and socialism over capitalism. It is totalitarian in Mussolini's original meaning of the term, of "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Fascism's message boils down to "Enough talk, more action!" Its lasting appeal is getting things done.In contrast, conservatism calls for limited government, individualism, democratic debate, and capitalism. Its appeal is liberty and leaving citizens alone.
I've been arguing with people for decades that there is little useful difference between fascism and socialism/communism. Certainly what difference there was was pretty transparent to the user. I think that nine out of ten (if not ninety nine out of a hundred) times that the word "fascist" is used (particularly as an epithet) it is utterly mindless. As Pipes notes, "Already in 1946, George Orwell noted that fascism had degenerated to signify 'something not desirable.'"
Classical liberalism is as far as it's possible to be from both fascism and socialism. While the notion of a one-dimensional scale to describe political views is ludicrous enough in its own right, the notion that, on such a scale, libertarians and fascists would be on the same side is demented, but many people (particularly ignorant leftists) continue to maintain this delusion.
I'd like to think that Jonah's book will provide a corrective to this decades-long calumny, but sadly, as is often the case, the people who need to read it the most probably won't. They'll just continue to ignorantly fulminate about the cover.
[Late morning update]
Jonah writes in USA Today today about Putin's role model:
While Time saw fit to linger on "the Russian president's pale blue eyes," they left out a fascinating rationale for Putin's power grab. For much of the last year, the Russian government has been lionizing an American president who roughly seized the reins of power, dealt briskly with civil liberties, had a harsh view of constitutional niceties and crafted a media strategy, which critics derided as "propaganda," that went "over the heads" of the Washington press corps.George W. Bush? Nope. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Putin has routinely invoked FDR as his role model. "Roosevelt laid out his plan for the country's development for decades in advance," he gushed at a news conference last fall. "At the end of the day, it turned out that the implementation of that plan benefited ordinary citizens and the elites and eventually brought the United States to the position it is in today."
"Roosevelt was our military ally in the 20th century, and he is becoming our ideological ally in the 21st," Putin's chief "ideologist," Vladislav Surkov, explained at a state-sponsored conference commemorating the 125th anniversary of FDR's birth.
There's a rich irony here. For years, liberals have wailed about the moral hazard of Bush's supposedly crypto- (or not-so-crypto) fascist presidency. And yet it's FDR, Lion of American Liberalism, who, some seven decades after his death, endures as the role model for Russia's lurch toward authoritarianism, if not fascism.
An inconvenient truth.
So, class, is Vlad a communist? A fascist? Both? Neither?
And if you don't want to take Putin's word for it, Hitler and Mussolini are involved, too.
Also, he notes the Bush derangement:
Back in the here and now, GWB has done nothing remotely like what FDR did (for good or for ill, some might say). Despite the constant bleating about his hostility to the rule of law and civil liberties, he hasn't tried to, say, pack the Supreme Court, or round up hundreds of thousands of Japanese (or Muslim) people.Bush's critics certainly have a point that our leaders need to think about the example we set. It's advice liberals should have heeded long ago.
Indeed, though I disagree that they're liberals.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AMSecurities pay $1 if candidate nominated for respective party. Go to Intrade to trade these. The images are deep linked so should reflect the most recent trades whenever you load the page.
McCain:
Giuliani:
Huckabee:
Thompson:
Obama:
Clinton:
I hadn't said anything about this long but useful post by Jon Goff, primarily because I hadn't had the time to read it. I just glanced through it, and it's definitely worth a read for those interested in rocket theology.
One point that I didn't really see addressed is (to me) one of the biggest disadvantages of single stage--off-design performance. Because a single-stage vehicle will have a much larger dry mass/payload ratio on orbit, if one wants to take it to higher altitudes or inclinations, the payload penalty will be much more severe than that for an upper stage of a multiple-stage system. Altitudes can be dealt with by staging in space (i.e., a tug that meets the vehicle at low altitude and transfers the payload to a higher-altitude facility), but inclination hits can't be accommodated in this way.
But I remain a launch-vehicle agnostic. I'd like to see a lot of different concepts developed, and let the market sort out which is the best, rather than engineers arguing over napkin sketches, or with Powerpoint charts.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should note that the comments are worth reading too, including contributions from Antonio Elias, Gary Hudson, and Dan DeLong.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:21 AMIt's now six years into Michigan's CCW law, and the rate of gun deaths in the state is in decline, while registrations are up. Here's what I had to say about this about five years ago, a year or so into the program. As Glenn notes, this should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with both the theory and available empirical evidence. Of course, the irrational clueless will always be with us:
Other opponents remain convinced that it has contributed to an ongoing epidemic of firearms-related death and destruction.Shikha Hamilton of Grosse Pointe, president of the Michigan chapter of the anti-gun group Million Moms March, said she believes overall gun violence (including suicide and accidental shootings) is up in Michigan since 2001. Many incidents involving CCW permit holders have not been widely reported, she said.
The most publicized recent case came early in 2007, when a 40-year-old Macomb County woman fired from her vehicle toward the driver of a truck she claimed had cut her off on I-94. Bernadette Headd was convicted of assault and sentenced to two years in prison.
Hamilton said that even if gun violence has ebbed, it remains pervasive, tragic and unnecessary. At the least, a more liberal concealed weapons law means there are more guns in homes and cars and on the street, she said, and more potential for disaster.
Note: "she believes." This is a faith-based religion. These people will never be swayed by reality.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:58 AMClark Lindsey reports that Patti Grace Smith is leaving FAA-AST. With a tenure of thirteen years, she has led the office longer than all her predecessors combined. If it happens soon, it seems to me that it's going to be tough for the Bush administration to find a replacement, since whoever takes the job may perceive that they'll be replaced again with a new administration. Perhaps someone (e.g., George Nield?) will simply act for her for the next year.
In any event, as Clark notes, she has done good things overall for the space entrepreneurs, and good luck to her in future endeavors. Let's hope that her successor has the same attitude.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:16 AMThe Rocky Mountain News, where he was a bloggist, has a nice obituary of Andrew Olmsted.
He will not be a forgotten soldier.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:53 AMIf there's any chance to head off a Huckabee disaster, it may be that Rush is the answer.
RUSH: All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to take the gloves off here for just a second. Welcome back, by the way, to the Rush Limbaugh program and the EIB Network. We're getting a lot of people calling here, claiming to speak for all evangelicals. Even Huckabee himself said on Fox yesterday that he did not get all of the evangelical vote in Iowa. It is not true to say that the evangelical vote in this country is monolithic and in total support of Mike Huckabee. If you want to call and speak for yourself, feel free to do so. Most of the pro-life groups out there, by the way, not groups of religious people, but most of the pro-life groups happen to be supporting Fred Thompson. In another thing, we had a guy, Eric from North Carolina, who called and said and that the Home School Legal Defense Association endorsed Huckabee. That's not true. One of their top dogs did, a guy named Michael Farris, but the association did not. You can go through their website and you will find a lot of critical articles on Huckabee, re: home schooling. They had a press release saying that Farris' endorsement is not an endorsement from them. This is a guy that accused me of deceiving people. You can call here, you can say what you want, but be very careful, because I am an encyclopedia. If you're going to start making claims here, we're going to find out about it.
He then proceeds to take them to school.
There's still time to educate the evangelical (true) conservative voters in South Carolina, and here's hoping that a combination of Rush and an energized Fred can head him off at the pass in the next few days.
[Late evening update]
Fred is South Carolina bound. Send some money, if you believe in the cause, and can afford it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:17 PMThat's the siren on Drudge (no permalink, as usual):
Facing a double-digit defeat in New Hampshire, a sudden collapse in national polls and an expected fund-raising drought, Senator Hillary Clinton is preparing for a tough decision: Does she get out of the race? And when?!"She can't take multiple double-digit losses in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada," laments one top campaign insider. "If she gets too badly embarrassed, it will really harm her. She doesn't want the Clinton brand to be damaged with back-to-back-to-back defeats."
It seems a little premature to me. Of course, it wouldn't be the first time a Clinton pulled out early.
[Update late morning]
Wow. Dana Milbank sure isn't a Hillary fan.
[Another update before noon]
Looks like Bill Richardson has put all his chips on Obama:
"The preternaturally jolly McAuliffe is a good man to have spinning for you in a pinch. But his good cheer dimmed when I asked him about Bill Richardson, who appears to have made an 11th-hour deal to throw his supporters to Obama. "How many times did [Clinton] appoint him?" McAuliffe marveled. "Two? U.N. Ambassador and Energy Secretary?" He looked at me, half-glaring, awaiting confirmation. "I don't know," I joked, "but who's counting?" "I am," McAuliffe said firmly"Joe Monahan this morning also cites current ABC newsman (and former Clintonista) George Stephanopolous to the same effect -- that Richardson has burned whatever bridge he may have had with the Clintons -- and Monahan suggests that, for Richardson, New Mexico may end up being the Land of Entrapment.
He might want to start wearing a helmet that can handle flying ashtrays.
[Afternoon update]
Brian Cherry has some pretty tart comments about the situation:
Iowa Democrat voters discarded Hillary like a healthy body rejecting a kidney transplant from a baboon. This was in a microcosm what can happen when Hillary is running in the general election against whoever the Republicans choose as their nominee.During the 2006 mid-term elections Republicans stayed home for a number of reasons. They were depressed by Congressional Republicans spending money like a Kennedy at the Mustang Ranch; they were weighed down by a President who acted more and more like the leader of Mexico then the United States, and many were simply fooled by the Conservative talking candidates that the Democrats found to run for House and Senate seats. With Hillary on the ballot though, apathy will simply not be possible, and even many of the Republican voters who take issue with candidates like Giuliani over his opinions on abortion will come out to proudly put a nail in Hillarys coffin. In short, the Clintons will have to find a way to deal with a Republican and Conservative voter turnout that will probably happen in unprecedented numbers. No wonder Hillary is all for importing the entire population of Mexico and giving each of them a drivers license. That way they can also get a voters card combat the avalanche of opposition voters she will be contending with.
There will be those who take issue with what I am saying based on the idea that Hillary may not be the Democrat nominee. Despite her loss in Iowa she will probably bounce back and may very well be saved by the coasts and by states like Michigan where Obama and Edwards pulled themselves off the ballot because the mitten state moved their primary up against the wishes of the DNC. If she is still behind after Super Tuesday, there is always the possibility that Barack will be found face down in his morning bowl of Count Chocula with six bullet holes in his back and a suicide note written in same handwriting that was found on the Vince Foster suicide/resignation letter. She becomes the nominee by default in the case of this unfortunate accident.
By the way, for those in comments who tell me not to count her out yet, I don't. I'll believe it's over when Dorothy brings me the broom. And I think that it's going to get very nasty before then.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:19 AMDaniel Pipes writes that he was too raised (sort of) as a Muslim. And that means that his life is at risk not just because he's a presidential candidate, but also because he's a high-profile heretic, with a death sentence over his head, based on the teachings of his former religion. Not that it's a reason not to vote for him in itself, but this strikes me as a much more interesting religious problem than either Romney or Huckabee have.
Of course, it's also interesting that, in all its Obama worship, the MSM continues to try to whitewash this away, accusing Pipes of spreading "falsehoods."
[Update a few minutes later]
Heh: "...isn't it a bit odd that the leading candidate for 'change' is a Chicago Democrat?"
Speaking of Chicago, if it is perceived that Hillary steals the nomination from him now, via super delegates and the like, expect Denver to make the events from four decades ago in that city look like a matronly tea party.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:40 AMI just lost four hours of work when Word 2007 12.0.6015.5000 died. Last time that happened that badly was when I was working on my dissertation in 1996. It not only killed the open file, but all of the open word files. No autorecover. Custom bullets then bam. Save early save often. My wife's compact flash card is off to data recovery, too. Must have been that horseshoe that was pointed down. You might think Microsoft would tell me if my autorecovers are failing to save? Open the pod bay door HAL. Anyway, I didn't have this problem with 2003. Ugh.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 07:37 PMHas any southern candidate done well in New Hampshire? Bill Clinton came in second, despite his spin at the time about the "comeback kid."
I ask because I'm a little surprised at the antipathy expressed by Frank Luntz' focus group to Fred Thompson.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:56 PM...that I wish that the media would ask, but probably won't. It would separate the wheat from the chafe.
"Senator, Governor, whatever... Do you believe that we are at war with an enemy with whom no negotiation is possible?"
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:42 PMJanuary 6, 2008
MANCHESTER (APUPI)
In the days leading up to the crucial primary in this crucial state, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney put his money where his mouth is today in the hard-fought race for the Republican nomination.
"I am the candidate of change!," he declared.
"To prove it," he went on, "I am going to use my millions to provide every New Hampshire voter who shows up at the polls on Tuesday with a huge bag of nickels, to spend on whatever you wish, whether it be a down payment on your five thousand dollar fee for John McCain's scamnesty program, or your first month's payment on my mandatory health-insurance plan. We'll even provide a truck to help you carry the loot home."
In related news in the Democrat primary, Senator Hillary Clinton, who used the word "change" at least three hundred and forty times in last night's debate, before transcribers got tired of counting, reiterated her commitment to it in a town hall meeting here today. "I promise that if I don't win this nomination I will really be making change, even more than I have for the last thirty-five years. And in addition, I'll be asking many of you in this audience, 'would you like fries with that'?"
In unrelated news, several Clinton campaign advisors were admitted to the local emergency room with mysterious head injuries that had the appearance of blows from high-velocity table lamps.
[Update after watching the Republican "forum" which is a much better term than "debate']
Rudy points out that "change" is less important, much less important, than what kind of change we get. I'm not in general a Rudy fan, but kudos. I wish that Fred, who spoke before him on the subject, had made at least that brief point.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:52 PMI'm listening to the Republican debate, and wondering why they put up with this bullshit (yes, I don't use that word often on this family...sort of... blog) from the MSM. Why do they allow Democrat media types to frame their debate?
The most egregious case of this is the question that just came up--why shouldn't people vote for Barack Obama?
WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD ANY REPUBLICAN CARE ABOUT THIS QUESTION IN A REPUBLICAN DEBATE?
Romney responded with a bunch of blather that had little to do with the question, and Thompson came up next. I was disappointed.
It was a "I'm not doing no hand shows" moment, and he blew it.
The first words out of his mouth should have been, "Let me preface my answer with the statement that this is a foolish question for a debate that only Republicans are really interested in. It might be a perfectly fine question a few months from now, in a general election, if Obama in fact becomes the candidate, and I (or one of these other gentlemen) are debating him, but Republicans, or at least smart ones (and I don't know that many dumb ones) don't care why I or anyone on this stage thinks that they shouldn't vote for Barack Obama. They're trying to pick a Republican candidate. Now, having said that,...[then go on to the response he actually gave].
But instead, he just returned to Republican principles, but I think he missed an opportunity to bash the press again, which a lot of Republican activists would have loved.
One other thought overall. Mike Huckabee is one slick-talking, two-faced socialist son of a bitch. I'll have to go through the transcript to make the case, though. He's a combination of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, in Republican clothing.
Must be something about people who were born in Hope, Arkansas, and became governor of the state. If the campaigns of the other Republican candidates are worth anything, there is much fodder here for anti-Huckabee ads that will amply and convincingly demonstrate this.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here are some related thoughts to the latter point from Jonathan Adler (though more calm than mine, though they weren't in the wake of the debate):
It's interesting that Huckabee is now stressing a limited government message, as it has not been a significant part of his platform up until now. Rather this is a guy who celebrates farm subsidies, disavows free trade, and likes the idea of a national smoking ban, and his campaign manager has disparaged the limited government ideology that motivates many Republicans in New Hampshire and elsewhere. That he can deliver such a message effectively is no surprise he's a very smooth talker. The question is whether his newfound embrace of limited government ideals is sincere. I have my doubts.
I have no doubts. It is clearly quite insincere, to anyone who has observed his actual governing (and other campaign statements) as opposed to his mercurial and chameleon-like campaign rhetoric for New Hampshire.
[Update a little later]
Here's an example that struck me, too:
"The right to live our lives...the way we want to, and not have the government tell us how to do it."Is this the same Mike Huckabee that wants the government to tell us how to eat?
Yes, that one really jumped out at me.
[Another update]
The Romney team, at least is loading the guns. An example:
Gov. Huckabee, January 2007: "Well, I'm Not Sure That I Support The Troop Surge."MSNBC's NORAH O'DONNELL: "We have a Rudy Giuliani, who supports the president's plan on Iraq. We have Governor Mitt Romney, who also supports a troop surge. How are you different from any of those candidates."
HUCKABEE: "Well, I'm not sure that I support the troop surge, if that surge has to come from our Guard and Reserve troops, which have really been overly stretched." (MSNBC's "Live," 1/24/07)
One other comment, from several people, with which I agree, and should add to the glossary: "Getting into the weeds": an argument too abstruse for simpletons like Charlie Gibson to follow.
Nice for now that Thompson doesn't have to do it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Not that it's news, but McCain speak with forked tongue, too:
"'There are jobs that American workers simply won't do,' McCain said. 'As long as there's a demand for workers, workers are going to come across.' An amnesty program is vital to any immigration legislation that includes a guest-worker program, he said. 'Amnesty has to be an important part because there are people who have lived in this country for 20, 30 or 40 years, who have raised children here and pay taxes here and are not citizens. That has to be a component of it,' he said. 'How can we have a temporary worker program if we're not allowing people who have been here for 30 years to hold jobs here?'" (C. T. Revere, "McCain Pushes Amnesty, Guest-Worker Program," Tucson Citizen, 5/29/03)McCain maintains that anyone who says he supported amnesty is "lying."
[Another update]
Jim Gerachty notes another missed opportunity by Fred:
Thompson says he's [Obama] adopted the views of every liberal interest group in the country. He mentions the NEA.Fred! Fred! Somebody on that stage was endorsed by the New Hampshire NEA! Mention it, mention it!
He didn't mention it.
The person being referred to here is Huckabee...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:35 PMFortunately, it appears that they caught it from birds. But we can't let our guard down.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:03 PMSocial security is trying give out debit cards instead of checks while IRS is moving to ban refund loans. I guess the IRS subscribes to the ostrich theory of micro financing: out of sight, out of their minds.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 11:05 AMDoes anyone find it dissonant that Iowan Democrats gave a victory to an admitted marijuana user to become President and the Senate is letting him keep his seat, while denying money to college students convicted of possessing illegal drugs?
The question that is begged is, "Does prior marijuana use help the chances of a Presidential candidate?"
Obama's last speech had a fog index of 8.17 (higher is more academic). McCain, 8.14 (most recent 4 weeks old on hydrogen?!); Clinton, 9.5; Giuliani, 11.6; No speeches I could find on the Huckabee site, just responses to opponents jabs, his foreign affairs article got 13.05.
My prior beliefs were that veterans like Giuliani would speak at the lowest level of diction and Obama and Clinton would use their race and sex as license to be less "regular guys" and more intellectual. That the leaders for New Hampshire are the candidates with the lowest Fog index tells me that the other campaigns need to use the K.I.S.S. formula: "Keep it simple, stupid!"
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 08:11 AMAndrew Olmsted has been killed in Iraq, in a cause that he believed in dearly (not necessarily Iraq per se, as he explains posthumously, but in simply serving his country). My most profound condolences to family and friends.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:05 PMJohn Hood makes an excellent point:
There is also a longer, truly heart-felt affection by center-left journalists for McCain, who mirrors their sentiments on the issue they (wrongly) believe is central to American politics: campaign-finance reform....in this matter Iowa is inconvenient for the McCain/Left argument. Huckabee had little money and won. Romney spent lots of money and came in second.
This is one of the biggest reasons that I do not want to see John McCain as president. Of course, it's also one of my many unhappinesses with George W. Bush, who signed a law that he stated himself he believed to be unconstitutional, thus betraying his oath of office.
A nice overview at The Economist.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:50 AMAt The Lancet. This isn't really new news--anyone with half a brain who looked at the study carefully at the time (i.e., not all-too-credulous journalists) could see that it was a nonsensical statistical mess. But the case against it is looking even stronger now.
Of course, it fulfilled its political purpose--to damage the Republicans and the Bush administration in the 2006 elections. And when it comes to righteous moral crusades like that, accuracy and scientific integrity be damned.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:09 AMAs of 7:20 EST Friday, on Intrade, Obama has moved up to $0.48 on the dollar vs. $0.50 on the dollar for Clinton. Clinton is showing as a close third to Edwards in Iowa dropped her from a high of $0.70 last week.
On the Republican side, McCain is trading at about $0.31 on the dollar for Republican nomination now ahead of Giuliani at about $0.27 with Huckabee at $0.17 and Romney at $0.14. Giuliani was trading at $0.45 at the beginning of December.
A political stock market, a class of info markets, is the best known device for aggregating poll data and all other available data, public and private about the chances of the candidates.
Obama-NH last trade at $0.65 out of $1.00 vs. $0.44 for Clinton. For SC, it's Obama $0.62 with Clinton's last trade at $0.42. Some arbitrage opportunities here to lock in more than $1 by selling short each candidate. McCain is trading at $0.75 for NH and in SC, The Rest of the Field (There's no Huckabee security here for some odd reason) is trading at $0.40 vs. McCain's $0.30.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 05:46 AMNo better place to hang out tonight for the Iowa Caucus (Cauci?) than Iowahawk's place.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:33 PMEveryone (well, not everyone, but the conventional wisdom) is writing off Fred Thompson.
But this prognostication raises a question that (as far as I know) has never been asked. Everyone assumes that if Fred drops out, he throws his support to his old bud McCain. But what if Thompson does much better than expected, and after South Carolina, McCain drops out? Where does his support go? Will he explicitly endorse Thompson? And even if not, will his voters go there anyway?
It's hard to see them going to Huckabee, Romney or Giuliani. What do they have to offer the conservatives and hawks who were with McCain (assuming that's why they were with him). Neither Huck or Mitt has been very strong on the war (that's a vast understatement with respect to Huckabee, who seems to be a Republican version of Jimmy Carter). And Rudy seems too socially liberal to attract McCain voters (many of whom are presumably attracted by his pro-life position).
If Fred comes in third (and two positions above McCain) in Iowa, as predicted above, he will probably have enough momentum to ignore New Hampshire and raise money for South Carolina. Particularly since he will have shown that he didn't "enter too late" (the other candidates entered too early, as he continually points out) and that he can do well when he focuses on a needed state.
The key point is that with all of these polls, no one has a majority. The real question is: where will people go when their favorite flames out? People should be asking that about every candidate, not just Fred. This is still anyone's (well, OK, not Ron Paul's, or the other minor candidates') race, in that if one can pick off the votes of the others, they can rapidly raise their percentage to a majority. This seems like good news for Fred to me, if he can do well tonight. This is a result of the fact that there's no Republican incumbent.
And if no one can, then things will be very interesting at the convention. It seems to me that if it ends up brokered, that ends up being good for the most genuine heir to Ronald Reagan as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:44 PMIs the age of the audiophile over?
I still have a lot of vinyl from the seventies. I really need to get a new tonearm/cartridge for my turntable so I can hear real music again.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:57 AMThe Lakota are declaring their independence.
"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.
They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.
Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.
The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.
They have really gotten a raw deal, having had socialism imposed on them by the Great White Father back east for all these decades.
It will be interesting to see how many countries recognize them (Venezuela and other America haters are a sure bet).
It also will be interesting to see what they actually do, and what Washington's response will be. Will they implement border controls?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:30 AM...from 2007. A roundup by John Hawkins. He's got them from both sides of the aisle, but the vast majority are clear products of Bush derangement.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:51 AM...and filmed our cat.
Well, except for the very last. She hasn't done that.
Yet.
[Via Geek Press]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:13 AMA new space and SF blog, from Wired refugees.
[Via Alan Boyle]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:56 AMFred Thompson says that journalists lack fire in the belly.
(Can we please retire that idiotic cliche now?)
Well, it was inevitable that it would come to this, given how badly broken our journalism system is.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:57 AMMore evidence that Omega-3 is good for you:
Fish oil and its key ingredient, omega-3 fatty acids (found in fatty fish like salmon), have been a mainstay of alternative health practitioners for years and have been endorsed by the American Heart Association to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.Fatty acids like DHA are considered "essential" fatty acids because the body cannot make them from other sources and must obtain them through diet. Years of research have shown that DHA is the most abundant essential fatty acid in the brain, Cole said, and that it is critical to fetal and infant brain development. Studies have also linked low levels of DHA in the brain to cognitive impairment and have shown that lower levels may increase oxidative stress in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.
Based on the positive results, the National Institutes of Health is currently conducting a large-scale clinical trial with DHA in patients with established Alzheimer's disease. For those patients, Cole said, it may be too late in the disease's progression for DHA to have much effect. But he is hopeful that the NIH will conduct a large-scale prevention clinical trial using fish oil at the earliest stages of the disease -- particularly because it is unlikely that a pharmaceutical company will do so, since fish oil in pill form is readily available and inexpensive.
There are a lot of other reasons to be consuming Omega-3. This is just one more.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:17 PMBill Whittle has a long ode to John Boyd.
A lot of this theory applies to NASA as well. Unfortunately, space isn't important enough to compel the government to do it well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:39 AMSuch is the low esteem of George Bush's America in the rest of the world that Britain and France are fighting over which of them is our closest ally.
After decades of Anglo-French rivalry, in which France has vehemently deplored the global influence America and Britain have attained and what every president of France since Charles de Gaulle has described as "Anglo-Saxon culture," Mr. Sarkozy claimed during his visit to Washington last week that France, not Britain, is now America's best friend and partner.Mr. Brown, who has been portrayed on both sides of the Atlantic as having distanced himself from America to avoid the charge against his predecessor, Tony Blair, that he was Mr. Bush's "poodle," fought back last night, claiming in a speech at a banquet thrown by the lord mayor of the city of London that the French president's bid to usurp Britain's traditional place alongside America would not succeed.
I hear the Democrat candidates bloviate on the campaign trail about how they're going to "repair our relations" with the rest of the world, and wonder on what planet they're living. Hilarious.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:34 AMHolman Jenkins endorses space tourism, Bigelow and COTS in his Wall Street Journal Opinion column today as means to speed the time when humanity can survive a big rock hitting us on one of the planets where we live. (I write this from the Yucatan Peninsula which owes its formation to a big rock).
Unless you can avoid a newspaper in 2008, expect to be reading a lot about human extinction. In June arrives the hundredth anniversary of the Tunguska impact, which leveled 800 square miles of Siberia. By happenstance, a rock of similar size may smash into Mars on Jan. 30, affording scientists a close-up view of a planetary disaster....At times like these, thoughts naturally turn to escape.
Watching Michigan play Florida. They should be up by three touchdowns, and instead they're tied. If they lose, it will be due to all those turnovers and lost opportunities. Hard to believe that Mike Hart has fumbled twice in this game, given his overall record.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:06 PM