Transterrestrial Musings

RIP WFB

While I'm not a conservative, and never have been, I came to appreciate William F. Buckley much more as I grew older and started reading National Review (though not consistently--I've never had a subscription) back in the Reagan years. An intellectual giant has passed.

The Corner is (not surprisingly) all WFB all the time right now.

[Update at 2:30 PM]

A tribute from Mario Cuomo:

I was privileged to know William Buckley for more than 20 years and was in fact his opponent in his last public debate.

He may not have been unique. But I have never encountered his match. He was a brilliant, gentle, charming philosopher, seer and advocate.

William Buckley died ... but his complicated brilliance in thought and script will survive him for as long as words are read. And words are heard.

[Early evening update]

Bob Poole weighs in, with a libertarian perspective:

By creating National Review in 1955 as a serious, intellectually respectable conservative voice (challenging the New Deal consensus among thinking people), Buckley created space for the development of our movement. He kicked out the racists and conspiracy-mongers from conservatism and embraced Chicago and Austrian economists, introducing a new generation to Hayek, Mises, and Friedman. And thanks to the efforts of NR's Frank Meyer to promote a "fusion" between economic (free-market) conservatives and social conservatives, Buckley and National Review fostered the growth of a large enough conservative movement to nominate Goldwater for president and ultimately to elect Ronald Reagan.

In many ways, this is a loss for the conservative (and libertarian) movements even greater than that of Reagan. But due to his influence, which is immeasurable, he leaves behind many to pick up and carry the torch for freedom forward.

[Evening update]

Ed Kilgore has further thoughts:

Buckley once said he offered his frequent polemical enemy Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a "plenary indulgence" for his errors after Schlesinger leaned over to him during a discussion of the despoilation of forests and whispered: "Better redwoods than deadwoods." And that's certainly how a lot of us on the Left feel about the legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr. (see progressive historian Rick Perlstein's tribute to WFB's decency and generosity at the Campaign for America's Future site). He made us laugh, and made us think, and above all, taught us the value of the English language as a deft and infinitely expressive instrument of persuasion. I'll miss him, and so should you.

It's a shame that I have to suffer pea-brained feces-flingers in my comments section on the occasion of his passing. That person will clearly never be able to use the English language as an expressive instrument of persuasion, infinitely or otherwise. It's sad that he's unable to realize how unpersuasive, and deserving of the contempt of all, that he is. It's equally sad that he has no sense whatever of shame, no matter how deserving.

[Update early Thursday morning]

The Washington Post says that Buckley will be missed. Well, not by certain scumbags in my comments section, of course. But who cares about them...?

[Update early morning on February 28th]

Here's a huge compendium of encomia from all points on the political spectrum. Sadly, the only unbonum words that I've seen have been expressed in my own comments section. But then, I don't deliberately go to the wacko leftists web sites.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:27 AM

Regretful

About five years ago, I did a "regret analysis" on whether or not we should remove Saddam Hussein:

From a "minimax" standpoint, the current course is the lowest-cost one.
Of course, some would argue that this is too simplistic an analysis, because (among numerous other reasons) it doesn't take into acccount the probabilities of the various scenarios being true, which, if you had them, you could multiply them by the costs to get expected values.

Of course, the problem with that approach here is that, if the cost estimates are wild-ass guesses, the probabilities would be even more so. How much confidence could we have in the output of such an analysis?

What we're dealing with here is not risk, in which the probabilities can be reliably quantified, but uncertainty, in which they cannot.

As an example, a thirty percent chance of rain represents risk. "It might rain, or it might not, but we have no idea what the probability is" constitutes uncertainty. It's much easier to decide whether or not to take an umbrella in the first circumstance than the second.

For this reason, economists have come up with a more sophisticated technique for decision making in the absence of probabilities of outcomes. Rather than simply looking for the lowest cost, they instead try to minimize how bad you'll feel if you make the wrong decision--they minimize "regret."

It's based on the notion that when you make a decision, you shouldn't compare it to some unattainable ideal of zero cost--you should compare it to the best decision you could have possibly made.

Take a simple case--do you take an umbrella when it rains, or not?

Consider a generic cost matrix:

State 1 State 2 Max

3 4 4

1 5 5

It looks like we can minimize our maximum cost by choosing action 1, since four is less than five. But is that really the right decision?

Let's derive a "regret" matrix from it. This is done by finding the minimum cost for any state, and subtracting each cell of that state from it. The minimum cost for state one is 1, so the column would be three minus one for the first row and one minus one (or zero) for the second row. That makes intuitive sense, since if you made the right decision for that state, you'll have no regrets. The regret matrix for the example cost matrix is shown below:

State 1 State 2 Max

2 0 2

0 1 1

Note now that if we want to minimize regret, we should actually choose action 2. Note also that this is independent of the relative probabilities of the two states.

NASA is confronted with exactly this kind of uncertainty with the vibration issue on the Ares 1. They don't know how big the problem is, and have no way of quantifying it with current knowledge. Thus, they're going to spend billions on getting to an initial flight test, and hope that they don't find out that they'll have to spend additional billions (not currently budgeted) to fix the problem, or give up completely and go to a new design (with more billions not currently budgeted), whereas if they knew now that it was intractable, they could stop wasting money on it and move directly (so to speak) on to a different concept.

Now, I don't have access to the program data to properly fill out the cost matrix, so the following numbers are pulled out of an orifice, but hopefully not the nether one--my WAGs are better than those of many with such things.

Let's keep it simple, with two courses of action, and three states.

One course is to abandon the concept now (noting that there are other reasons to do this than only the vibration problem--that's just the latest issue). The other is to continue forward with NASA's current plan.

The three states are:

There is no problem--the frequencies of the solid don't resonate with the vehicle structure, and don't present any hazard to upper stage, crew vehicle, or crew
There is a problem, and it will take a lot of time and money to mitigate it with dampers, shifting mass around, beefing up structure, etc.
There is a problem and it's not mitigatable, because the measures that would be required to do so would make it too heavy to deliver the required payload to orbit.

This provides us with six cells in the matrices, which have three columns (corresponding to states of reality) and two rows (the potential courses of action).

First let's consider Row 1: NASA's current plan.

Option 1: There is no problem. That is the hope (but as military planners will tell you, hope is not a plan).

What is the cost? Nothing. Or rather, the cost is what they expect to spend on the program if it's nominal. Let's call it a billion, on the assumption that this is what it will cost to get us to the flight test (if anyone has a better number, let me know).

Option 2: There is a problem, but it involves major changes to the vehicle design to compensate for it.

Let's say (to be kind) that it costs a year in schedule (what's the value of that?) and an additional billion dollars in development costs. Let's be generous again, and say that the year delay (in terms of "gap") is only an additional couple of billion. So the cost is the billion it takes to get there, a billion to fix plus the two billion for the delay--a total of four billion.

Option 3: The problem is intractable. There is no way to build the vehicle in such a way that it can deliver the required payload into orbit without shaking itself and/or the payload apart.

Now the cost is the billion dollars to get to flight test, plus a new design, almost from scratch, and about three years lost. Let's say that the new vehicle is a two billion dollar program, relative to what NASA would have spent to complete Ares 1 post flight test. If the gap costs two billion a year, then we have a total of nine billion dollars cost in this worst case.

OK, now for Row 2--scrapping the concept now and getting a head start on a design that will work. The cost is the same in all three cases. It's the cost of developing the new vehicle relative to expected expenditures on the Ares from here forward, plus, say, a two-year addition to the gap. Call it seven billion.

So the cost matrix looks like this:
COST MATRIX

No Problem	Fixable Problem	Insoluble Problem	Max
1	4	9	9
7	7	7	7

So the minimax solution, based on the cost matrix alone, is to switch now. It all depends on what you think the likelihood is that the problem will be intractable. We don't know that that is, so let's look at the regret matrix.

REGRET MATRIX

No Problem	Fixable Problem	Insoluble Problem	Max
0	0	2	2
6	3	0	6

Now, the course of minimum regret is to move forward. Regret is zero if there is no problem or it's fixable, and a max of two billion if they have to start over, whereas they risk a six billion dollar regret by giving up now.

So, at least a cursory analysis would indicate that NASA's approach makes sense, but I could be way off on the numbers. In addition, I'm not counting all of the less tangible costs of having to switch gears after a flight-test failure. Any thoughts from anyone else? Am I missing something?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:52 AM

Isn't That A Kick In The Pants?

I'm number eight on a Google search for "buttocks."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:45 AM

The Stupidest Person In The World

...has to be Keith Olbermann:

But you've got to love the staggering ignorance behind his continued insistence that fascists weren't socialists because they beat other socialists to death. Golly. How many socialists did Stalin kill? Pretty much all of the show trial victims weren't mere socialists but hardcore Communists. I guess Stalin was anti-Communist. Hitler's Night of the Long Knives involved the slaughter of Nazis, so I guess by Olbermann's logic Hitler was anti-Nazi. Most lefties can't stand Joe Lieberman, I guess they're anti-Democrat.

Heh.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:52 AM

Guess He Is The Messiah

Just call Barack Mr. Potato Head:

So when Jamie Lynn Dixon looked down at the potato she noticed that staring back at her was the visage of a man. And not just any man.

"Is it Jesus?" Earl Sr. asked.

"No," replied his son. "Better. It's Obama."

Right off, three of the waitresses up and fainted at the mere mention of Obama's name.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:07 AM

Iowahawk Meets Kato Kaelin

I used to go to parties like this up in the hills. I don't recall the ninja fembot valets, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:08 AM

Terminators, Coming Up

Alan Boyle has an interesting post on the ethics of killer robots.

"Asimov contributed greatly in the sense that he put up a straw man to get the debate going on robotics," Arkin said. "But it's not a basis for morality. He created [the Three Laws] deliberately with gaps so you could have some interesting stories."

Even without the Three Laws, there's plenty in today's debate over battlefield robotics to keep novelists and philosophers busy: Is it immoral to wage robotic war on humans? How many civilian casualties are acceptable when a robot is doing the fighting? If a killer robot goes haywire, who (or what) goes before the war-crimes tribunal?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:52 AM

What A Writer

Lileks:

It was dark, except for the crepuscular light struggling through the stained-glass window.

And he does this every day, seemingly effortlessly.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:29 AM

February 26, 2008
The People Here Are Poor But They're Not Stupid

The title of this post may be the Clintons' epitaph.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:43 PM

Reforming Islam?

Let's hope so:

Commentators say the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.

Its supporters say the spirit of logic and reason inherent in Islam at its foundation 1,400 years ago are being rediscovered. Some believe it could represent the beginning of a reformation in the religion.

Turkish officials have been reticent about the revision of the Hadith until now, aware of the controversy it is likely to cause among traditionalist Muslims, but they have spoken to the BBC about the project, and their ambitious aims for it.

Well, if anyone can do it, it seems like the Turks should be able to.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:59 PM

Old Habits Die Hard

Bill Clinton had a Freudian slip while supposedly campaigning for his wife. "If you elect me..."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:50 PM

Strange Internet Problems

As some of you have heard (it seems to be the main news now on cable), Florida had a massive power outage today. It didn't affect me, except indirectly.

About quarter after one, I heard a little click from my UPS, which usually indicates a power drop, but we didn't lose power, and even a computer that wasn't on a UPS didn't seem to have a problem. But I noticed shortly afterward that I had no internet connection. The DSL modem lights were all working fine, but I couldn't connect, even after repeated resets. I ended up being on the phone with AT&T for over an hour, and they finally got things working again. They told me that somehow (somehow?) my authentication had gotten screwed up, and that they had rejiggered (or some other technical term) the lines to get it working again. They didn't believe that it had anything to do with the power outage--that it was just coincidence. I'm skeptical.

Anyway, as you can see, I'm back on line.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:38 PM

No Truth In Labeling

Obama doesn't want to be called a liberal. Even though his positions seem to be uniformly "liberal" (used here in the modern, statist sense, not the classical sense).

I recall another liberal presidential candidate who didn't want to be called a "liberal":

JIM LEHRER: Do you think he successfully painted Dukakis as a liberal?
MS. STEELMAN: Oh, no, the beauty of last night was that he didn't have to paint at all. Dukakis clearly painted himself as a liberal. His responses were right down the liberal line, every one of them. That was the thing that most of us inside the Bush campaign found most remarkable is that he didn't even try to move to the center. George Bush, on the other hand, I think has shown himself as a very moderate candidate, a very conservative candidate at the same time, conservative on the issues where the American people believe the Reagan Administration has been successful, interest rates, inflation, economy, and moving forward on other issues where the American people clearly believe we need to have some answers like child care and others. And we think it was a very good debate because we didn't paint anything. There was no image making. Dukakis is a liberal and it showed. Bush is very much in the mainstream of American values and American opinion. And that showed.

It didn't work out very well for him.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:33 AM

Did He Call Him A Son Of A Bitch?

In the overzealous law enforcement department, a man was arrested for animal cruelty after yelling at a police dog.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:27 AM

Are Americans Stupid?

Phil Bowermaster has some thoughts:

See how deftly it's done? Stupid religious Americans, clever "heathen" Europeans. Unfortunately, in the context, this doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. Americans are opposed to stem cell research because we're ignorant religious bigots. Okay, sure. But we're opposed to nanotechnology for the same reasons? And GM foods?
GM foods? Now wait a second...a lot of Europeans are opposed to GM foods. I bet they would even say it's on moral grounds! Yet somehow, they manage to pull that off without being either 1) religious or -- more importantly -- 2) stupid. Personally, I think being morally opposed to GM foods is kind of stupid, and being "morally" opposed to nanotechnology is idiotic. However, I don't see how American stupidity is dumber than European stupidity; one may be informed by religious belief, the other by a paranoid superstitious dread of scientific progress. Advantage: Europe? If you say so.

I just hope that Americans aren't stupid enough to fall for Obama, as the Democrats currently seem to be.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:04 AM

Report From Anbar

Another photo essay from Michael Totten:

"Don't get any closer," Corporal Waddle said. "We need to stay out of the blast radius in case it blows."
One Marine, whose name I didn't catch, accompanied the Iraqi man to the location of the explosive. "It's an 82mm mortar round," he said when he returned. "It's not an IED. Most likely a round that didn't go off when it was fired."

Every time I thought something vaguely exciting might happen, it didn't happen. There is no war in Western Iraq any more. This is a mop-up.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:58 AM

Build A Little, Test A Little

Well, OK, not really. More like build a lot, test a little.

NASA apparently isn't going to know how serious the vibration problem on the Ares 1 is until they do a flight test.

Words fail.

[Via Shubber Ali, who does have some words]

[Update late afternoon]

No one who know him will be shocked to read that Mark Whittington thinks that this is a great idea.

But of course! How could it not be? NASA is doing it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:36 AM

Fascism In America

As described by Lileks:

As for the NRA logo, it's a reminder of the happy days of FDR's attempts to revive the economy by pouring a bowl of alphabet soup over its face. The NRA, among other things, was intended to prevent the depredations of competition, and "allowed industry heads to collectively set minimum prices," as this rather scant wikipedia entry notes. (The same page relates the story of the tailor who was arrested for charging 35 cents to press a suit; the NRA rules specified the price at 40 cents. So he was arrested. Consider that the next time someone complains that liberty and civil rights have been eliminated in the last 7 years.)

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:16 AM

The Women In His Life

Spengler says that Obama hates America.

I don't know whether he does or not, but his wife's attitude is very troubling, and I don't think that he's going to be the next president. I think that the first (true) black (and woman) president is much more likely to be a Republican.

[Update a few minutes later]

Isn't it interesting that the American press doesn't seem interested in stories like this one? I guess that it's just another example of foreigners doing the jobs that Americans won't do.

This would be a gift to the Clinton campaign, if they were in a position to criticize people over land deals. You can bet that the McCain campaign will use it in the general, if Obama gets the nod.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

It's That Time Of Year Again

Hope I'll see some of you at the Space Access conference in Phoenix next month.

[Update at 9:30 AM]

Attendees will get to hear John Carmack talk about cool vehicles like this one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:33 AM

The Economics Of "Free"

A fascinating and very useful article on the value of waste. It's must reading for anyone who wants to entrepreneur on the web, in my opinion. I found the byline amusing:

Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail. His next book, FREE, will be published in 2009 by Hyperion.

Will he be giving the book away?

[Via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:12 AM

February 25, 2008
Is The Leopard Still There?

The snows of Kilimanjaro are back.

Not to mention that the arctic icepack is growing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:06 PM

They Should

Dan Walters writes that the Dems fear train-wreck scenarios.

And I'll keep the corn popping.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:32 PM

Not So Identical

Apparently "identical" twins don't even have identical genetics:

Identical twins emerge when a zygote -- the fertilized egg that develops into an embryo -- splits into two embryos. As such, they should have the same genomes. The researchers speculate that as the cells making up each embryo divide over and over again during development in the womb, mistakes occur as dividing cells shuffle copies of their DNA into daughter cells.

But genetic differences between identical twins might also accumulate after development over a twin's life as well. "I think all our genomes are under constant change," Bruder told LiveScience.

I think that this has implications for cloning as well. It may not be possible to exactly clone an individual, and the differences could turn out to be quite noticeable.

[Update in the evening]

Per some comments, the key point in this story is that it has long been known that there are differences in twins (personality, eyesight, fingerprints, etc.). But those are things that can arise even from an identical genome. The genes are not a blueprint, but rather a recipe, and even if a recipe is followed carefully, the results are not always guaranteed to be the same. The point of the article is that, contrary to previous theories that obvious differences in twins could be attributed solely to different environments, that the genome itself wasn't necessarily the same. That is new.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:22 PM

Creating An Appearance Of An Appearance

Michael Kinsley has the best take so far on McCain and the New York Times:

I have come under some criticism for my criticism of the New York Times for its criticism of Sen. John McCain. Many readers of last week's New York Times article about McCain, including me, read that article as suggesting that McCain may have had an affair with a lobbyist eight years ago. The Times, however, has made clear that its story was not about an affair with a lobbyist. Its story was about the possibility that eight years ago, aides to McCain had held meetings with McCain to warn him about the appearance that he might be having an affair with the lobbyist. This is obviously a much more important question. To be absolutely clear: The Times itself was not suggesting that there had been an affair or even that there had been the appearance of an affair. The Times was reporting that there was a time eight years ago when some people felt there might be the appearance of an affair, although others, apparently including McCain himself, apparently felt that there was no such appearance.

Read all.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:58 PM

Which Is Greener?

Driving, or walking? John Tierney stirs up a hornet's nest of vegans and other morally overrighteous high-horse riders (see comments). I mean, to question Ed Begley, Jr. Isn't that just the height of apostacy?

This reminds me of a piece that I've been thinking of writing about overall energy and fuel costs, including human fuel. With the ethanol boondoggle, we've gone back to the point at which we're using crops for transportation (something we largely left behind at the end of the nineteenth century) and we now have increasing prices in both food and fuel as they compete with each other for the same farmland. This isn't a good trend for the Third World (consider that one of the effects of the ethanol subsidies has been a dramatic increase in corn and tortilla costs in Mexico, making a poor country even more so).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:18 PM

The Quality Of Quantity

Via Geek Press, we have some interesting audio illusions over at The New Scientist. I found this one particularly so:

Some pieces of music consist of high-speed arpeggios or other repeating patterns, which change only subtly. If they're played fast enough, the brain picks up on the occasional notes that change, and links them together to form a melody. The melody disappears if the piece is played slowly.

This is called an emergent property, and while many emergent properties arise from a critical mass (say, of the number of ants in a colony), they can also do so as a result of speed. Some AI researchers argue that human intelligence (and non-human as well) is in fact a result of simply having enough neurons (and at a higher level) various cognitive functions in one place to a degree that consciousness emerges. Others (such as Searle) scoff at the notion, arguing that gathering a large number of entities together isn't going to change their properties in a qualitative way, and that's simply common sense. You can't combine a lot of dumb things and somehow get something smart. The whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, but not (so to speak) the sum of its (not so) smarts.

The argument against this is to point out another non-intuitive result. Prior to Maxwell, who would have imagined that you could wave a magnet back and forth and create color? Well, if you just wave it slowly, you won't--all you'll see is someone waving a magnet. But wiggle it half a quadrillion times per second, and suddenly there's a electromagnetic wave that, when captured by the eye, causes one to (literally) see red. The auditory phenomenon described above is similar--play it too slowly and the music disappears, but speed it up, and a melody emerges.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:10 AM

February 24, 2008
Sore And Sunburned

Yeah, no posting today. Some long-time (over three decades) friends from Michigan were down for the weekend, and we went canoeing/kayaking today, seven miles round trip, on the south fork of the St. Lucie River, up in Stuart. I sunblocked my arms and upper portions, but forgot to do my legs. I'm just not used to wearing shorts, even in Florida.

I may post some pictures later, if after looking at them they seem worthwhile. We were a little disappointed at the wildlife. Only saw a couple gators, and no manatees. We saw several slider turtles though, and a sandhill crane walking through someone's front (on the river side) yard. And no one fishing, which seemed a little surprising.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:06 PM

Hillarious

Over at Free Republic, "lowbridge" has been checking out what's going on with the candidates in Second Life.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:04 PM

February 23, 2008
How The Mighty Have Fallen

AOL is pulling the plug on Netscape. I think that the beginning of the end was when they acquired it. But it lives on, really, in the Mozilla products.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:55 PM

The Fading Star Power Of The Clintons

Mark Steyn:

The Clintons turned the Democratic party into a star vehicle and designated everyone else as extras. But their star quality was strictly comparative. They had industrial-strength audacity and a lot of luck: Bill jumped into the 1992 race when A-listers like Mario Cuomo were too cowed by expert advice that Bush Snr. was unbeatable. Clinton gambled, won the nomination and beat a weak opponent in a three-way race, with Ross Perot siphoning votes from the right. He got even luckier four years later. So did Hillary when she embarked on something patently absurd -- a First Lady running for a Senate seat in a state she's never lived in -- only to find Rudy Giuliani going into instant public meltdown. The SAS, Britain's special forces, have a motto: Who dares wins. The Clintons dared, and they won -- even as almost everyone else in their party lost: senators, congressmen, governors, state legislators. Even when they ran into a spot of intern trouble, sheer nerve saw them through. Almost anyone else would have slunk off in shame, but the Clintons understood that the checks and balances don't add up to much if you're determined not to go: As at that 2000 convention speech, they dared the Democrats not to cheer.

With hindsight, the oral sex was a master stroke. Bill Clinton likes to tell anyone who'll listen that he governed as an "Eisenhower Republican," which is kind of true -- NAFTA, welfare reform, etc. If you have to have a Democrat in the Oval Office, he was as good as it gets for Republicans -- if you don't mind the fact that he's a draft-dodging non-inhaling sex fiend. Republicans did mind, of course, which is why Dems rallied round out of boomer culture-war solidarity. But, if he hadn't been dropping his pants and appealing to so many of their social pathologies, his party wouldn't have been half so enthusiastic for another chorus of "I Like Ike."

Read it all.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:07 PM

February 22, 2008
I Guess They're No Clintons

Hillary managed to keep her thesis under wraps throughout the Clinton presidency. Michelle Obama's is now apparently available for download. I'm sure that many will be commenting on it.

I have to say that I'm not sure that it's fair to judge her by this (though attempting to hide it somewhat increased the justification for why we might want to). Her recent words are bad enough in themselves, in my opinion.

[Update on Saturday morning]

Captain Ed has read the whole thing.

Again, what she thought and wrote as a college student is much less important (and perhaps not important at all) compared to what she says, writes and (to the limited degree we can ascertain it) thinks now.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:44 PM

Reader Poll

OK, I'm not actually going to bother to set up a reader poll. Just comment here. The issue is blog format on the main page (and perhaps archive pages as well).

When I moved to the new blogging platform, the default for things like permalink, author, comments, trackback, categories, etc., was to put it at the top, right after the post title. I had it there for a while, but a few days ago, I moved it back down to the bottom of the post, where it had been for the previous six years. Does anyone have any strong feelings about it one way or the other? My thinking was that it was a cleaner post the way it always was--title, then post, then other stuff. But if people are reading and only interested in space posts, or political posts, it might be better to tell them up front (and also tell them how many have commented on it).

I guess the question is, how much information do folks want before bothering to read the post (assuming it's a long enough one for it to matter), and does that desire override the aesthetics of not interrupting the flow between title and text? And (of course) are there other issues that I haven't considered?

[Update in the late evening]

Folks, I know it's frustrating, but this is not the post in which to complain that my blog comments section crashes browsers.

First of all, it doesn't crash browsers (AFAIK). It merely times out. It always times out, whether by posting comments or posting or updating posts. That's the nature of the beast as a result of the "upgrade" to MT 4.0.

I am most painfully aware of it. That's why I warn people before they post comments about it. I'm working on it, but I don't know enough about MT to fix it, and I haven't gotten any offers from anyone who does to help.

My current thinking is that I'll put author and category at the top, because those are the things that people would like to know as an input to their evaluation as to whether to read or not. The other things (comments, trackback, Digg, Technorati, etc.) will go at the bottom, because those are things that one wants to deal with after reading the post.

Any major objections?

[Update on Saturday morning]

As to the IE6 crashing problem, I have no idea what to do about that short of not providing a link to Amazon. I'm reluctant to do that, because it's one of the few sources of income that I get to support this blog. If someone can look at the code and tell me if there's something I can fix that still allows it to work, I'll be happy to do that.

[Early afternoon update]

OK, per some good suggestions in comments, I'm going with author, date and categories at the top, so people can judge whether or not they want to read it. I'll do permalinks, comments, trackbacks and referrals at the bottom.

Still working some of the other issues.

[Late afternoon update]

For what it's worth, I just tried with IE 6.0.2800.1106, and have no problems. No crashing, and it takes me to Amazon. So there's something else going on than just IE6.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:23 PM

Mystery "Solved"

Scientists now have a plausible, and likely theory for what created the Burgess Shale:

By looking over hundreds of micro-thin slices of rock taken from the famous shales, the researchers have reconstructed the series of catastrophic underwater landslides of "mud-rich slurry" that killed tens of thousands of marine animals representing hundreds of species, then sealed them instantly - and enduringly - in a deep-sea tomb.
The mass death was "not a nice way to go, perhaps, but a swift one - and one that guaranteed immortality (of a sort) for these strange creatures," said University of Leicester geochemist Sarah Gabbott, lead author of a study published in the U.K.-based Journal of the Geological Society.

I use the scare quote because that's the word used in the headline. This kind of language, I think, is (at least partly) what bothers people who continue to rebel against evolution, and science. It is a certainty of language (like "fact," rather than "theory") that they consider hubristic, and arrogant. After all, when Sherlock Holmes "solved" a case, it generally was the last word, case closed.

In this case, what the word means is that scientists have come up with a plausible explanation for an event for which they'd been struggling to come up with one for a long time, and it is sufficiently plausible that there are few scientists who argue against it, thus presenting a consensus. Does it mean that they have "proven" that this is what happened? No. As I've written many times, science is not about proving things--scientists leave that to the mathematicians. What scientists do (ideally) is to posit theories that are both reasonable and disprovable, yet remain undisproved.

There may be some other explanation for what happened up in what is now Yoho National Park that corresponds better to what really happened, but until someone comes up with one that makes more sense, or comes up with some inconvenient indisputable fact that knocks this one down, it (like evolution itself) is what most scientists, particularly the ones who study such things for a living, will believe.

And of course, I won't even get started on how upset some anti-science (and yes, that's what they are, even if they don't recognize it) types will get over the statement that one of the ancestors of humans is in that shale.

[Update a few minutes later]

Oh, the main point about which I put up this post. This is an excellent illustration of how rare are the circumstances in which we find the keys to our biological past. Those that demand that we cannot know the history of life until every creature has died on the body of its parents, perfectly preserved, are being unreasonable. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, we do science with the (rare) evidence that we have, not the evidence we'd like to have. There will always be many huge holes in the fabric of the evidence, barring the development of a time machine to the past. We simply do the best we can with what we have, and put together theories that best conform to it. To say that God (or whoever) did it isn't science--it's just a cop out. And that is true completely independently from the existence (or not) of God (or whoever).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:11 PM

How Clueless Is Obama About The Military?

This clueless:

A platoon is the smallest unit deployed outside of [special forces] operations. Sending 24 men to one theater and 15 to another would destroy unit cohesion, leave one group without an officer and be a nightmare for the next higher unit's (the company) command, control and communication structure. You should take this story with a grain of salt -- that grain being the size of the moon.

"Ready to be CiC."

Riiiigggghhhht.

Of course, if Hillary wasn't equally clueless, she would have called him on it--she missed a huge opportunity to embarrass him. But then, it took a couple years for Bill Clinton to learn how to throw a proper salute (IIRC). And of course, she'd have probably loved to use the story herself.

[Update in late afternoon]

Despite comments, my post title stands. The fact remains that whatever the actual story, Obama told a tale in the debate last night that was implausible on its face, for reasons that many pointed out. The fact that there was an actual story that was somewhat like it (it was a Lieutenant at the time, they were split up before they were deployed, they didn't actually have to capture Taliban for their weapons, etc.) doesn't change the fact that as actually related in the debate, it was clueless about the way the military works. Someone with actual military experience would have realized this, and worded it differently (and more accurately).

And the point was never that the Obama campaign fabricated the story. It was that they didn't recognize one that seemed implausible, because they didn't have the wherewithal to recognize it as such, and it fit their political agenda (Bush is the Worst President Ever) as was, ignoring the fact that there's never been a time when troops had everything they needed, when they needed it, under any president.

Ace has more thoughts, and continues to call bovine excrement.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:11 AM

Could It Get Any Better?

Ralph Nader may be jumping into the race

I'm going to have to go over to Costco to pick up a fifty-gallon barrel of Orville Redenbachers.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:33 AM

Dodgy

Is Hillary avoiding process servers?

Doesn't the question answer itself?

Hillary Clinton was dismissed as a co-defendant in the case at a hearing in April, 2007 because of democrat Appellate Court Judges' support of her belated effort to seek the protection of California's Anti-SLAPP law. At that hearing, trial court Judge Aurelio Munoz admonished David Kendall by telling him unequivocally that any effort to deny Senator Clinton's testimony as a witness in the case would be "Dead on Arrival". To emphasize his point, the Judge followed his statement by saying "Did you hear that Mr Kendall?"

In typical Clintonian hubris and contempt for the judicial process, Hillary had her diminutive counsel with the over inflated ego state to Paul's lawyer, Colette Wilson, that none of the three lawyers of record representing Hillary in the case would accept a witness subpoena for her deposition on her behalf.

It doesn't seem like it should be all that hard. Just show up at a campaign event, ask her for an autograph, and hand it to her. Then announce that she's been served. Be sure to have a confederate with a videocam, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:03 AM

Cylons

Alan K. Henderson has found the reason for McCain's support of amnesty for aliens.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:45 AM

Space Carnival

Chris Lintot has the forty-second edition.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:22 AM

A New Take On An Old Subject

Jason Bellows muses on life without the moon. Asimov had a much longer essay on this topic, decades ago, in which he speculated not only about its impact on the development of life, but on the development of intelligence, science and civilization.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:41 AM

February 21, 2008
An Evolutionary Golden Oldie

In light of the decision of my current home state, Florida, to teach evolution as "only a theory" (as though there's something wrong with that), I thought that I'd repost a post from early on in the blog. You can no longer comment on it there, but you can here, if anyone is inclined. Here is the repost:

========================

The Jury Is In

In a post last week, amidst a lot of discussion of evolution, Orrin Judd made the mistaken claim that evolution is not a falsifiable theory (in the Popperian sense), and that (even more bizarrely and egregiously) defenders of it thought that this strengthened it.

On a related note, he also added to his list of questions about evolution a twelfth one: What would it take to persuade me that evolution was not the best theory to explain life? What evidence, to me, would disprove it? I told him that it was a good question, and that I'd ponder it.

Well, I did ponder it, and here is my response.

First of all, the theory is certainly falsifiable (again, in the theoretical Popperian formulation). If I were coming to the problem fresh, with no data, and someone proposed the theory of evolution to me, I would ask things like:

Does all life seem to be related at some level?

Is there a mechanism by which small changes can occur in reproduction?

Does this mechanism allow beneficial changes?

Can these changes in turn be passed on to the offspring?

Is there sufficient time for such changes to result in the variety of phenotypes that we see today?

There are other questions that could be asked as well, but a "No" answer to any of the above would constitute a falsification of the theory. Thus the theory is indeed falsifiable, as any useful scientific theory must be.

The problem is not that the theory isn't falsifiable, but that people opposed to evolution imagine that the answer to some or all of the above questions is "No," and that the theory is indeed false.

But to answer Orrin's question, at this point, knowing the overwhelming nature of the existing evidentiary record, no, I can't imagine any new evidence that would change my mind at this point. Any anomalies are viewed as that, and an explanation for them is to be looked for within the prevailing theory.

And lest you think me close minded, consider an analogy. An ex-football player's wife is brutally murdered, with a friend. All of the evidence points to his guilt, including the DNA evidence. There is little/no evidence that points to anyone else's guilt. Had I been on the jury that decided that case, it would have at least hung. I might have even persuaded a different verdict, but that's unlikely, because I'm sure that the jury had members who were a) predisposed to acquit regardless of the evidence and/or b) incapable of critical thinking and logic, as evidenced by post-trial interviews with them.

But for me to believe that ex-football player innocent, I would have to accept the following (which was in fact the defense strategy):

"I know that some of the evidence looks bad for my client, but he was framed. And I can show that some of the evidence is faulty, therefore you should throw all of it out as suspect. I don't have an alternate theory as to who did the murders, but that's not my job--I'm just showing that there's insufficient evidence to prove that my client did it. Someone else did it--no one knows who--it doesn't matter. And that someone else, or some other someone else, also planted evidence to make it look like my client did it. It might be the most logical conclusion to believe that my client did it, but that would be wrong--the real conclusion is that it is a plot to confuse, and it just looks like he did it. Therefore you shouldn't believe the evidence."

Is this a compelling argument? It was to some of the jury members. And it apparently is to people who don't want to believe that life could evolve as a random, undirected process.

The only way that I could believe that OJ Simpson is innocent at this point would be for someone else to come forward, admit to the crime, and explain how he planted all of the abundant evidence that indicated Orenthal's guilt.

The equivalent for evolution, I guess, would be for God (or whoever) to reveal himself to me in some clear, unambiguous, and convincing fashion, and to tell me that he planted the evidence. At which point, of course, science goes right out the window.

But absent that, the evidence compels me to believe that OJ Simpson murdered his wife (as it did a later jury in the civil suit), and the evidence compels me to believe that evolution is as valid a theory as is universal gravitation.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:40 PM

How It Went Down

Gizmodo has a video and the story on the satellite hit.

Oh, and so much for the naysayers who said it wouldn't work. Wishful thinking, one suspects.

They've been poo-pooing this since the eighties, going back to Tsipis and Garwin in SciAm. A good example of Clarke's First Law, about elderly and distinguished scientists.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:23 AM

Tugs And Ferries

Jon Goff has some useful thoughts on in-space transportation elements. Dave Salt has a salty comment:

If you go back a couple of decades (circa 1985) you'll find NASA was developing your "tug" and calling it the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV), while what you term a "ferry" was being developed as the Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) - astronautics.com has some nice pages describing each.
They were (and still are) logical elements in any reusable LEO infrastructure that uses space stations/platforms/depots as transportation nodes to enable sustainable deep-space missions... which is probably why they don't feature in ESAS :-)

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:16 AM

Better Print Some More Money

Zimbabwe's inflation rate is 100,000%:

In Africa's fastest shrinking economy, per capita gross domestic product in Zimbabwe fell from about $200 in 1996 to about $9 a head last year.

What a disaster Mugabe has been. It shows how easy it is to destroy a once-vibrant country (Rhodesia was the bread basket of southern Africa) with insane government policies. And the sad thing is that his fellow African autocrats refuse to denounce him. I'll bet that if there was a free and fair election there today, the people would vote Ian Smith back in.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:42 AM

Jabba The Hut Really Lived

They've discovered fossils of a giant carnivorous pre-historic frog. I wouldn't want to run into him on a dark lily pad.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:23 AM

Arbeit Macht Frei

You know, I think that someone wrote a book about this sort of thing:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

They can have my cynicism and uninvolvedness when they pry it from my cold dead soul that needs healing.

[Update a few minutes later]

Further thoughts from Mr. Steyn:

I wouldn't mind if it was a high-minded call to a self-reliant citizenry, but you get the feeling all it boils down to is a demand that we take our place and twirl our batons in the 300-million cheerleading squad for Barack! The Barack Obama Show starring Barack Obama. The "shed your cynicism" bit sounds like a scene from one of those dystopian movies where you get slid into the Cynishedder as a bitterly sardonic old crank in a pork-pie hat and after 30 seconds bathed in the rays of the Obamatron you emerge in a turquoise 1970s catsuit with a glassy-eyed stare.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:24 AM

February 20, 2008
Bingo

Apparently the shooting gallery was a success.

A defense official says a missile launched from a Navy ship in the Pacific hit the U.S. spy satellite it was targeting 130 miles above Earth's surface. Full details are not yet available.

Presumably, we'll find out just how successful it was in the coming days.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:38 PM

"Progressive" Space Discussion

This post by Matthew Yglesias would be a lot more interesting if he explained why it was "advantage, Obama."

What is Yglesias' position?

It kicked off a lively discussion in the comments section, in which he doesn't participate (so we still don't really know what he thinks), but in which sometime commenter here, Bill White, and Ferris Valyn, do. Ferris has further thoughts, and links.

It also roused a spirited defense of government manned spaceflight programs (at least I assume that's what he's defending) by Chris Bowers. I find Bowers' argument a little (well, OK, a lot) incoherent:

...the space program is about as good an example of stretching and expanding our capabilities as a nation and as a species that one can name. Deciding to not test the limits of our engineering and intellectual potential, and to not explore our surroundings because we have more important things to do, strikes me as a profoundly dangerous path to follow. That is the path of stagnation, and even regression, as a people. Further, it is a terribly utilitarian approach to life, concluding that only bread matters, and that roses are worthless. Personally, I don't want to live that way, and I don't think many other people want to live that way, either. Everyone, no matter their financial situation, has aspects of their life that expand beyond mere bread and into roses: art, religion, family, travel, and scholarship are only a few examples of this. To think that we shouldn't have government funded roses in our lives is to posit a far more dreary nation than the one in which I want to live.

Well, I think that a nation in which one must count on the government to provide either bread or roses a dreary one. Last time I checked, there was plenty of bread, of all varieties, on the shelves of the local grocery, and I suspect that if the government weren't involved, it would be even cheaper. I also bought two dozen roses last Thursday at the same place--there was no shortage, and they didn't seem to have a stamp that said they were manufactured by the government. If he means rose gardens, there are plenty of those, too, both government and private. And I sure don't want the government involved in family or religion, so I guess I just don't see what his point is.

I do agree with this, though:

Space exploration is not an issue with clear partisan divisions. Some conservatives view it as a wasteful government expenditure that is better handled through private enterprise, while some progressives view it through a utilitarian lens in that it does not provide much direct benefit to humanity.

Unfortunately, this is quite true. In fact, it's one of the reasons that our space policy itself is so incoherent. The people who promote it don't generally do so from any kind of ideological base. It's either a bread-and-butter local issue to provide jobs, or it's a romantic urge that crosses ideological boundaries. And that's why the arguments (in both Bowers' and Yglesias' comments section) are never ending, and never resolved. Heinlein once wrote that man is not a rational animal; rather, he is a rationalizing animal. Most arguments for a government space program are actually rationalizations for something that the arguer wants to do for emotional reasons, which is why so many of them are so bad. I say this as a space enthusiast myself, but one who recognizes that it is fundamentally an emotional, even religious urge.

I'm not going to beat up on Obama over this (though I'm not going to vote for him, either). Here's what he reportedly said:

...the next president needs to have "a practical sense of what investments deliver the most scientific and technological spinoffs -- and not just assume that human space exploration, actually sending bodies into space, is always the best investment."

Contrary to what some reading-challenged people write (see the February 16th, 2:22 PM comment), this doesn't mean that he "hates manned spaceflight." Those words, as far as they go, are entirely reasonable, and Hillary was pandering for votes in Houston. The rub lies in how one makes the determination of what is "the best investment."

Unfortunately, in order to evaluate an investment, one must decide what is valuable. That's where all these discussions founder, because everyone comes to them with their own assumptions about goals, values, costs, etc. But these assumptions are never explicitly stated, or agreed on, so people tend to talk past each other. Until we have a top-down discussion of space, starting with goals, and then working down to means of implementing them, people will continue to argue about what the government should be doing, and how much they should be spending on it.

This is why getting a private space program, a dynamist space program, going is so important. Because it will short-circuit all the arguments, because we won't be arguing about how to spend other people's money, which is always contentious. We will be spending our own money, for our own goals, rational or irrational, with no arguments in the political sphere, or blogosphere.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:26 PM

Lunar Eclipse Tonight

There may be an opportunity for a red moon. Last chance in the US for almost three years. I think it's going to be cloudy here, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:01 PM

Kiss Ohio Goodbye, Hill

I wouldn't want to be the person to deliver this news to her. The Teamsters are endorsing Obama.

At some point, a person who cared about their party and country would withdraw and help the nominee position for the general election. But Hillary! isn't that person. She's been dreaming of being president since she was very young, and this is her only realistic shot--it's now or never. I still expect her to fight it all the way to Denver, barring a complete electoral collapse in two weeks.

And don't be shocked if, even with a united party (it won't be), Obama turns out to be another George McGovern, or Walter Mondale, in terms of electoral votes. I don't think that the donks have any notion of how much they're screwing themselves in nominating either of them.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:23 AM

Where Will I Get My Shower Radio?

Sharper Image has filed for Chapter 11. I wonder if they'll be able to reorganize?

I always thought their stuff was overpriced, and apparently a lot of people agreed with me. They also spent a lot on sending out all the catalogs. I wonder if their business model even works any more, what with Amazon and all.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:51 AM

Taking On McGyver

Here's a fun interview with the Mythbusters. I don't get this, though:

My favorite episode, that I think the science is the most right, is ''Bullets Fired Up'': Will a bullet that you fire directly into the air kill you when it comes back down? We tried it in several different ways, and every single way we tried it -- from a shop experiment, to a scaled outdoor experiment, to a full-size outdoor experiment where we fired a full clip of 9mm rounds into the air out in the desert -- confirmed the same results. If it's coming straight down, it won't kill you. But if you fire it on an angle of even two degrees, it stays on a ballistic trajectory and it will kill you. So when you see someone in a movie fire their automatic rifle on kind of a spray up into the sky, probably all of those bullets are actually deadly. The amount of data we collected on it was more than anybody up to that point had ever achieved on firing bullets into the air.

I don't get what they're saying here. Why would it come down any harder if it's at a slight angle? How did they determine whether or not "it would kill you"? If it's in a vacuum, it should come down with exactly the same vertical velocity component it had when it left the gun (except reversed), but the atmosphere complicates things. It seems to me that any bullet fired in the air is going to be coming down at terminal velocity, unless the potential energy is so high that it doesn't have time to get to terminal velocity before it hits the ground, but that's pretty hard to believe. When it leaves the muzzle of the gun, it's supersonic, but I would think that it won't be able to be going that fast when it falls back down, because of air drag. This seems like something that should be simulatable with CFD (it might even be possible to do it analytically, if the bullet was round).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:48 AM

Democrat Science Policy

Alan Boyle has a comprehensive write up of the "debate" between the Clinton and Obama science advisors at the AAAS meeting. I can't say that I'm thrilled about either of their proposed policies. But I don't expect much better from McCain, particularly given that he's drunk deeply of the global warming koolaid.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:56 AM

Does Solar Photovoltaic Make Sense Yet?

An interesting discussion of the current economics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:44 AM

Can't He Be On A Black Horse?

Lileks has some thoughts on Obama, and his acolytes:

There is tremendous faith in his ability to just wave a love-wand and get things done. I remember the same zeitgeist afoot in the land in 1992; change was the mantra then, too. Odd how things turn out - I'd be happier with Hillary as President than Obama, simply because she seems a bit more seasoned and realistic. And I do find it interesting that people who have decried the shallow, theatrical, emotion-based nature of contemporary politics are now so effusive in their praise for someone's ability to move crowds. Perhaps they don't mind a fellow on a white horse if he promises to nationalize the stables.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:09 AM

February 19, 2008
Get Out The Superglide

The Communist News Network (aka CNN) has issued instructions to its reporters as to how to report the Great Fidel's stepping down from power, after only fifty years. And they call Fox News biased?

Nick Gillespie has un-Christian thoughts. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:04 PM

The Problem With Democracy

There will always be more sheep than wolves. There will also be a lot more sheep than sheep dogs.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:48 PM

Sagan Memories

I was never a big fan of Cosmos, though I think that it did a lot of good in interesting people in space. I'm listening to a rerun on the SCIHD channel, and I recall why.

Sagan's voice is too pompous, too arrogant, and the ubiquitous sonorous tone, and pauses, which lent themselves to parody ("billions and billions") are really arrogant. I wish that he had written it, and someone else narrated.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:06 PM

Must Be Global Warming (Part 15,478)

There's a massive snowstorm in Greece. You know, that balmy, Mediterranean country? Did Al Gore visit recently?

I don't know who said it first, but when it's hot, it's climate, but when it's cold, it's just...you know...weather.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:51 PM

How It Will Go Down

The folks at AGI have attempted to model the satellite break up. Unfortunately, they need more data to have much confidence in it. But even still, I doubt if my free version of Satellite Took Kit would be up to the job that they've done.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:35 PM

Faithful To Fidel

Some encomia, from the few (but unfortunately not few enough) remaining other commie stooges and dictators. And don't you have this sense from a lot of the press coverage that managing to brutally remain in power for half a century is some sort of laudable achievement?

(And yes, lest the pedants leave comments, I know that the plural is encomiums, but I just like encomia better, having studied Latin.)

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:13 PM

Has Obama Been Vetted?

The question almost answers itself--the press is in love with him. Glenn thinks that he has, but as his reader points out, it's only been by the left. Interestingly, when the Clinton campaign attempted to go at him obliquely from the right, tainting his electability by talking about his race or past drug use, it was viewed with opprobrium. But in fact there are a lot of unanswered questions about him, and now that he's looking like the likely nominee, the true vetting on the right is starting. For instance, was he a red-diaper baby? If so, should we care? Is to ask the question (and yes, I am asking the question) intrinsically dirty politics? Is it "McCarthyism"?

But here's a more interesting issue that is just starting to surface. Michelle Obama hasn't gotten a lot of attention, and particularly negative attention, to date. But that's starting to change as well, with her apparent inability to come up with anything about which to take pride in America in the past quarter century. They're supposed to be the first "post-racial" candidates. But are they?

...the evidence is plain that Barack and Michelle Obama both belong to that subset of educated black Americans to whom their own blackness is of obsessive interest, or at very least was up through their college years. Barack famously wrote "A Story of Race and Inheritance", about his own long struggles with his racial identity.

Now here's Michelle Obama in the current Newsweek cover story. She graduated from Princeton in 1985 with a major in sociology and a minor in African-American Studies. Sociology, huh? At first sight that's encouraging -- I mean, at least she didn't spend her entire college career obsessing about her blackness. Then Newsweek tells us the title of her senior sociology thesis: "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." (I have this mental image of her thesis adviser saying: "Michelle, isn't there some way we can squeeze another 'black' into that title?")

Again, does it matter? At least in her case?

A little history is in order here. Once upon a time, a man ran for president. He had a law degree. So did his wife. Both from Yale, to be specific. In fact, the wife was lauded by an adoring press to be one of the most brilliant women in America, if not the world. But there were things about her that were not only not reported, but actively kept hidden (and we're not just talking about the Rose law firm billing records). One of them was her college thesis, which only recently became available for the public's perusal. Why was it secreted away for the eight years of the presidency? And why should we have cared?

Well, one of the themes of that presidential race was that the superwoman would be a "co-president," that the fortunate nation would be getting "two for the price of one."

So now enter Barack Obama, a charismatic young man with a message of, if not from, Hope, with a law degree of his own and a wife with a law degree as well (both from Harvard). Now he hasn't been campaigning as a two-for-one special, but it's very clear that his wife strongly influences him in his campaign, and there's no reason to think that she wouldn't do the same as commander-in-chief. So, even setting aside the issue of whether we want someone who values "feeling" over "thinking," it seems reasonable to wonder about her political views and methods as well, particularly if we're going to get a "co-president" by stealth.

And as we wonder, what do we discover? That (assuming the report is correct) her college thesis has been embargoed until election day. Like Jonah, I wonder why as well. What are they trying to hide? Something that can't simply be laughed off as the naivety of youth?

I also wonder what other similarities to another aspiring first couple there are.

[Update a little later]

I hadn't read that entire WSJ piece, but deeper down in it, we find this:

In her senior thesis in 1985, Mrs. Obama wrote that her college experience "made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' " than ever before, adding, "I will always be Black first and a student second" on campus. At Harvard Law, Mrs. Obama, involved in the Black Law Students Association, pushed hard to improve the low numbers of African-American faculty and students.
"We got into big debates on the condition of black folks in America," says Harvard classmate Verna Williams. "She's got a temper."

I guess someone read it before it was locked away.

Does she remain this aggrieved? Based on her very recent statement that her husband's presidential campaign is the only thing praiseworthy about America, one suspects so.

[Update an hour or so later]

How do they do that? I only posted this an hour or so ago, and it's already in the top ten of a Google search for "michele obama princetonn thesis." And they didn't even spell "Princeton" or "Michelle" right.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Someone just did a search on it spelled correctly (after reading this post?), and it was only in the top thirty, not the top ten.

Weird.

[Late afternoon update]

Per the commenter who answered my rhetorical questions above about "red diaper" babies. I agree. So does Andrew Stuttaford over at NRO. It will probably be a counterproductive avenue of attack.

But here's something interesting in regards as to whether or not Obama is an empty suit. One of the questions was how effective his speeches are without a teleprompter. Now the issue is how effective his speeches are without his ability to plagiarize others' speeches:

Speaking at a Town Hall in Texas, and the Deval things appears to already be having an effect. He was reading straight from a speech in front of him on the lectern, instead of the famous sweeping oratory, complete with hand gestures and eye contact. He stumbled a lot, and the ideas were awkwardly phrased. He was talking about the mortgage crisis, which I'll admit, I don't fully understand myself, but he clearly didn't understand it either. I don't know if he's tired, or if he feels he can't use his normal stump speeches for the time being, or if it was the format, or what, but it was weird for sure. I've grown used to the other Obama, the confident, consummate Obama.

Apparently, if true, he's not only lost without his teleprompter--he's been using a lot of stock phrases as part of his magician's patter that he's no longer able to use, and his speeches are suffering for it.

[Mid-evening update]

The Anchoress is thinking along the same lines as I am--is Michelle Obama the new Hillary?

[Another update a few minutes later]

Is David Axelrod the man behind Obama's curtain?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:44 AM

NOTAM

This seems like a pretty big exclusion area for the satellite shot on Thursday. Is it going to disrupt airlanes? I'd be pretty annoyed if my trans-Pacific flight was delayed for it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:05 AM

Get A Rooster

Lileks sets an alarm clock:

First you push the ALARM SET button, and you should get our old friend, Mr. Blinking Twelve. But no. You press SOURCE to select iPod or FM tuner. Repeatedly pressing this button just makes the iPod option flash on the display, though, and you figure you've done something wrong. So you turn the device OFF.

And the display face lights up. This is the first indication that the device was designed by the American Union of Nonintuitive Interfaces. These guys get a lot of work nowadays. You start again. SOURCE. You get the flashing iPod option. Ah hah: here's another on/off button; let's try that. It turns everything off and powers down the unit. That's an option you've never had on an alarm clock before; if we had world enough and time, we could consider the possible scenarios in which one would want to power down the alarm clock. None come to mind.

Speaking of roosters, having spent some time in tropical climes where they run around wild, I can attest that the notion that they crow at dawn is a myth that has been foisted on city slickers like me. Or rather, that they only crow at dawn. I hear them crowing at dawn, at sunset, at lunchtime, at 2 AM. They may be good at waking you up, but not at any particularly useful time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:55 AM

Is Nanotechnology Immoral?

Well, I don't think so, at least not intrinsically. But apparently a lot of people do. I wonder how the results would come out if you said "molecular manufacturing" instead?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:48 AM

Gone The Way Of Eight Track And Betamax

Toshiba is throwing in the towel on HD-DVD. Looks like Sony won, this time.

That explains all the cut-rate players at Christmas time. I'm sure that the entertainment industry is happy to only have to deal with one new medium. Wonder how long they'll continue to produce standard DVDs?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 AM

February 18, 2008
Too Good To Be True

I would love to see this happen:

The word on the street is that the Obama campaign and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg have already met and devised an incredible plan if Clinton wins the nominee [sic]. Mayor Bloomberg would give nearly $1 billion to Obama's campaign after which Obama would bolt from the Democratic Party and run as an Independent candidate with king-maker Bloomberg as his running mate.

That would make it a walk-in for McCain. In fact, it would be deliciously ironic, because it was exactly that kind of situation (with nutty billionaire Perot) that allowed Bill Clinton to slip into the White House in the first place. If Bush had gotten all the votes that Republicans normally get, Bill wouldn't have had a chance. So the justice would be poetic if Hillary's nomination was torpedoed by an independent run that pulled a lot of the Democrat vote.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's likely. Even if Hillary does win (or steal) the nomination, much as I'd like to see it, I don't believe that Mike Bloomberg is so politically stupid as to think that he can run as a "centrist" on an Obama ticket. And "centrist" (nannyism and all) has always seemed to me what he fancies himself as. But an Obama campaign, whether Democrat or Independent, isn't going to pull centrists, particularly once his voting record gets highlighted. It would split the Democrats, not the Republicans or "independents," and it would probably not only give McCain the presidency, but possibly give the Republicans the Congress back.

If Bloomberg really does something like this, it can only be because he deludes himself that McCain is a "right winger" and that there is plenty of room to his left. As I said, I'd love to see it, but I'd have to see a lot more evidence than "the word on the street" from Armstrong Williams.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:06 AM

February 17, 2008
Where Has He Been?

An interesting comment from this post:

Me and my family used to be the biggest fans of Bill Clinton. Everyone in my community can't stand to see Bill on TV anymore. I'm not sure if its his older age or maybe the lack of sleep lately, but I truly believe his lost his mind. He makes no sense anymore, cares about nothing other than attempting to get his wife elected, plucks words right out of the air while stating nothing, and now even goes against the voices of mass voters...

Bill Clinton is really not he same person I USED to respect and admire!

Sorry, he's exactly the same person you used to (foolishly and myopically) respect and admire. He's the same person he's been his entire political career, going all the way back to the seventies in Arkansas. Anyone who has followed his career, or read non-hagiographic biographies of him knows this. The only thing that's changed is that you've found a new empty vessel into which to pour your emotional political longings, and he's attacked it, so now you see the Bill Clinton that the rest of us have seen all along.

As I've said many times, I don't now, and never have "hated" Bill (or Hillary Rodham) Clinton. I find them far too trivial and unworthy subjects on which to expend such an intense and miserable emotion. I think that I'm in fact far more clinically objective about them than most Democrats have ever seemed to be able to be. The problem is not the "Clinton haters" (most of whom were merely pointing out the reality), but the far too many people who have loved him, far beyond reason, for decades. That was the source of his power.

And now that the scales have fallen from the eyes of many like the commenter above, the end may be very ugly, particularly if they are perceived to have stolen the nomination from Obama (something that they are surely plotting as I write this). Denver may make Chicago in 1968 look like a Sunday-school picnic.

They've never cared about the Democrat Party, other than as a convenient vehicle for the conveyance of their unlimited and insatiable ambition and lust for power, and they've been a disaster for it ever since they hit the national scene. They cost it the Congress for the first time in four decades, and the party couldn't hold on to the White House at the end of their term, at least partly because of the stench of it in the minds of the voters in 2000. Having Bill Clinton campaign for a Democrat has generally been the kiss of death, but because of this irrational love of them, they've managed to keep on doing it.

When it comes to the Clintons, it's always about them, and they always come first, and the national Democrats are finally starting to realize it, sixteen years later. If they'd been smart, and listened to Arkansas Democrats at the time, they could have had the much earlier epiphany, and spared their party a lot of corruption and embarrassment.

Oh, when the end comes, it won't be as bad as the Ceausescus (this is America, after all), but it will certainly be as final. There will be no more comeback kids. If he's still around in a couple decades, I suspect that Bill Clinton will be continuously enraged and deeply envious of the legacy of George W. Bush.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:06 PM

February 16, 2008
Frying A Turkey Without Oil?

Not exactly, despite the claim of this post:

Deep frying is a form of convection heating. Instead of hot air, you are using hot oil to transfer the heat. Depending on the oil used in the fryer, the temperature is usually about 375 degrees to keep the food from absorbing a lot of oil.

The Big Easy uses infrared energy to "bathe" food. It excites the proteins, not the water. Thus, you are literally frying it. It's just like sitting in the sun all day. The infrared energy will "fry" your meat's skin. The Big Easy doesn't need a lid because it's better to let the hot air escape. That way your food doesn't dry out and there's no basting necessary. Unlike conventional turkey fryers there is also no warm-up period. Just drop your thawed turkey (stuffed or unstuffed, injected or not, sugar-less rubbed or not) into the chamber and turn the Big Easy on. Infrared energy starts cooking it immediately and the cooking time for 12-14-pound turkey will be cut almost in half.

Without expressing an opinion on the relative merits of cooking a turkey this way, it's not equivalent to deep-fat frying. As it says, it only radiates the skin, whereas a deep fryer gets hot oil inside the bird as well, which has to speed up the cooking time considerably. And if the oil is sufficiently hot, there's no reason that it has to make the bird greasy, or any more so than it would be naturally from its own fat.

The Big Easy™ is $165 at Amazon, whereas serviceable friers are available for less than half the price. Of course, with the former, you don't need any oil, which might save you ten bucks or so per turkey preparation, so it might pay for itself over time if you do a lot of turkeys. But considering the time value of money, I think that you'd have to be a real turkey fan to make up the difference. Of course, it might be good for other meats as well.

[Update late evening]

Contrary to Glenn's comment, I don't call "foul." The proper spelling is "fowl."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:46 PM

More Blog Rebuilding Progress

Despite the vast suckitude of the Movable Type documentation, I'm slowly starting to figure things out. One of the nice features of the upgrade is that it allows multiple categories, rather than just one, and I've finally figured out how to display them. Not only that, but you'll see that if you click on a category associated with a given post, that you'll get an archive page of all posts in that category. That will allow those who complain that they come here only for the space stuff, or only for the politics, to customize the blog to their own tastes (assuming that I do a good job of categorizing things).

Unfortunately, it's a huge page, because it contains literally every post in that category that I've ever written. It's a fast load for me, because I have a good connection, but I may change it so that it only gives you the previous (say) month's worth of posts, to help those that are more bandwidth challenged. This feature will also allow folks who have me in their blogroll with specific interests to link to that specific interest (e.g., fellow space bloggers might want to just link to the space posts). If I can figure out a way to build a link (and archive page) with a filter for multiple categories, I'll let folks know, but at least some customization is doable now.

I also have to pretty up the archive pages so they look like this one.

And I still haven't solved the timing-out problem, so we'll just have to continue to suffer with it for now, until I can get some help from an MT guru.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:58 AM

What Do They Know?

As Clark says, I don't know why anyone would think that space scientists or astronauts are experts on business. I don't really care what Kathy Sullivan thinks the prospects are for suborbital tourism, and if I thought that astronauts' opinions on the matter were of value, I can find many astronauts (including John Herrington, Rick Searfoss, etc.) who would disagree with her.

And who is this "Alvin" Aldrin of which they speak? Is that Andy's evil twin? When I do a search for "Alvin Aldrin" I only get one hit--this article.

A couple other questions for Alvin/Andy. What numbers was he using for the Raptor cost? Marginal, or average per-unit? It makes a big difference.

In addition, I always get annoyed when people use a military fighter as a cost analogue for a spaceship. A lot of that dollar-per-pound number for the plane comes from something in it that weighs nothing at all--software. The avionics for the weapons systems, and the defensive systems are non-trivial in cost as well. Designing a combat aircraft, designed to kill other things and avoid being actively killed by other things, is an entirely different problem than designing a vehicle that has to only contend with passive and predictable nature (and pretty benign nature, for the most part, at least for suborbital). I'd bet that Burt's own cost numbers for the SS2 already put the lie to Andy's chart.

[Late afternoon update]

Jeff Foust has a much more extensive writeup of the discussion, which he apparently attended. As I suspected, it was Andy, not Alvin, Aldrin.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:39 AM

A Kludge

Is this the future of air travel?

Engineers created the A2 with the failures of its doomed supersonic predecessor, the Concorde, very much in mind. Reaction Engines's technical director, Richard Varvill, and his colleagues believe that the Concorde was phased out because of a couple major limitations. First, it couldn't fly far enough. "The range was inadequate to do trans-Pacific routes, which is where a lot of the potential market is thought to be for a supersonic transport," Varvill explains. Second, the Concorde's engines were efficient only at its Mach-2 cruising speed, which meant that when it was poking along overland at Mach 0.9 to avoid producing sonic booms, it got horrible gas mileage. "The [A2] engine has two modes because we're very conscious of the Concorde experience," he says.

Those two modes--a combination of turbojet and ramjet propulsion systems--would both make the A2 efficient at slower speeds and give it incredible speed capabilities. (Engineers didn't include windows in the design because only space-shuttle windows, which are too heavy for use in an airliner, can withstand the heat the A2 would encounter.) In the A2's first mode, its four Scimitar engines send incoming air through bypass ducts to turbines. These turbines produce thrust much like today's conventional jet engines--by using the turbine to compress incoming air and then mixing it with fuel to achieve combustion--and that's enough to get the jet in the air and up to Mach 2.5. Once it reaches Mach 2.5, the A2 switches into its second mode and does the job it was built for. Incoming air is rerouted directly to the engine's core. Now that the plane is traveling at supersonic speed, the air gets rammed through the engine with enough pressure to sustain combustion at speeds of up to Mach 5.

A combination turbofan/ramjet. Hokay.

If I understand this properly, the idea is to fly fast subsonic over land to avoid breaking windows, and then to go like a bat out of hell over the water. When I look at that design, I have to wonder how they can really get the range, with all of the drag that is implied from those huge delta wings, not to mention the wave drag at Mach 5. I also wonder where they put the hydrogen--that stuff is very fluffy, and needs large tanks. It's probably not wet wing (it would be very structurally inefficient), which is why the fuselage must be so huge, to provide enough volume in there for it.

Sorry, but I don't think that this will be economically viable. As is discussed in comments and the article, hydrogen is not an energy source--it's an energy storage method, and it's unclear how they'll generate it without a greenhouse footprint. Moreover, it's not as "green" as claimed, because dihydrogen monoxide itself is a greenhouse gas. I'll bet that this thing has to fly at sixty thousand feet or more to get itself sufficiently out of the atmosphere to mitigate the drag problem, and that's not a place where you want to be injecting a lot of water.

This concept doesn't learn the true lessons of Concorde: like Shuttle, a lot of people have learned lessons from Concorde, but the wrong ones. The correct lesson is that we need to get rid of shock waves and drag. Once we do that, we'll be able to cruise at reasonable speeds (say, Mach 2.5) everywhere, over both land and water, so we won't have to build the vehicle out of exotic materials and eliminate windows. We'll also be able to have fast transcontinental trips (two hours coast to coast) which is another huge market that this concept doesn't address at all. Finally, it has to do it with a reasonable lift/drag ratio, so that ticket prices will be affordable. And I think that the fuel issue is superfluous--Jet A will be just fine for the planet, as long as fuel consumption is reasonable, which makes the vehicle design much easier, with much more dense fuel.

Fortunately, I've been working for over a decade with a company that thinks it knows how to do this, and I'm hoping that we'll be able to start to move forward on it very soon.

[Via Clark Lindsey]

[Update in the late afternoon]

In response to the question in comments, there's not much publicly available on the web about shock-free supersonics, but here's a piece I wrote a few years ago on the subject.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:13 AM

February 15, 2008
Caulking The Ship

It's about time. Firefox is finally fixing all of its memory leaks:

No matter the reason or the timing, Mozilla claims progress on the memory front. In its release notes, the company trumpeted the fact that the just-released Beta 3 plugged more than 350 leaks, with over 50 stopped in the last eight weeks alone.
"We've made a lot of progress," said Schroepfer. "Our memory usage is significantly improved, and dramatically better than [Microsoft's] Internet Explorer 7."

But the work's not finished. "Most of the big memory issues are resolved, and we're seeing some pretty good numbers [on memory consumption], but some additional [work] is one reason why we felt we needed Beta 4."

That's been one of my biggest complaints about Firefox. At any given time, I may have forty or more tabs open, and the memory usage would get to the point where the machine was paging so much to disk that it would just be brought to its knees, and I'd have to kill Firefox to recover the memory.

But I also have to say that since I upgraded my RAM from one to two gigs (on a Windows 2000 machine) the problem has largely gone away. For anyone who's unaware (and particularly now that memory prices are plummeting), the cheapest thing you can do to improve your computer's performance (dramatically, in my case) is to give it lots of memory.

But I may go get the beta version of Firefox 3 anyway.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:31 PM

Never Mind

There was a little bit of a buzz in the blogosphere a few days ago about Gizmodo's report that the Japanese plan to bombard the planet with frickin' laser beams from outer space. No word on whether or not they would be attached to the heads of sharks.

I thought it was a little strange, myself. While lasers have been proposed for space solar power, most of the concepts over the past four decades (ed-- wow, it's really been four decades since Peter Glaser came up with the idea? Yup) have been to transmit the power with microwave beams. Lasers (probably free-electron lasers with tuned frequencies) have the advantage of higher power density (and thus less need for large ground receivers). But they don't penetrate the atmosphere and clouds as well, and they are less efficient for power conversion. Also, they raise exactly the fear described in the Gizmodo piece--that higher power density is a double-edged sword. Microwaves are preferred because the energy conversion efficiency is very high, and the beam density is less than that of sunlight (it's better than sunlight despite this, because the beam is available 24/7 and the conversion efficiency is much better, at least with current solar cell technology). It's much more difficult to weaponize, by the nature of the technology.

Anyhoo, I'm assuming that what was actually being referred to was this:

On February 20, JAXA will take a step closer to the goal when they begin testing a microwave power transmission system designed to beam the power from the satellites to Earth. In a series of experiments to be conducted at the Taiki Multi-Purpose Aerospace Park in Hokkaido, the researchers will use a 2.4-meter-diameter transmission antenna to send a microwave beam over 50 meters to a rectenna (rectifying antenna) that converts the microwave energy into electricity and powers a household heater. The researchers expect these initial tests to provide valuable engineering data that will pave the way for JAXA to build larger, more powerful systems.

Microwaves, not lasers, as Gizmodo mistakenly claimed. The article does mention lasers as a potential means of getting the power down, but that's not what next Wednesday's test is about.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:31 AM

February 14, 2008
Did The Missionaries Finally Get Through To Them?

Gorillas have been photographed in the wild copulating face to face.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:06 PM

How Desperate Are The Clintons Getting?

Well, probably not quite this desperate (be sure to read the PS). At least not yet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:59 PM

This Makes No Sense

AP is reporting that the Pentagon is planning to "shoot down" the errant NRO bird.

You can't "shoot down" a satellite. In order to do so, you have to remove its momentum, so it falls out of orbit. All you can really do (at least with something as crude as a missile) is break it up into smaller pieces. If that's what they plan to do, they certainly can.

Won't it make a mess? Yes, for a while. Some of the pieces will enter immediately, others will be given a higher apogee (but lower perigee, so they'll enter half an orbit later). The orbits of those that aren't given much of an energy change will continue to decay as the satellite's original orbit was, except at a higher rate, because they'll have a lower mass/drag ratio. So in theory, if they do this, all of the pieces will have entered within a month or so (i.e., none of them will survive longer than the satellite itself is expected to).

This just points up the fact, once again, how nice it would be to actually have a robust in-space infrastructure of tugs and servicing facilities that would allow us to take care of things like this in a more elegant fashion. In fact, it would allow us to even go get the thing and put it in the right orbit, so we wouldn't have to dispose of it, and replace it. Unfortunately, it's not a capability that either NASA or the Air Force evidence any interest in developing.

[Late afternoon update]

Daniel Fischer is live blogging the Pentagon briefing on NASA TV, here and here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AM

February 13, 2008
No Peak Oil

Scientists have apparently located a deposit of hundreds of times as many liquid hydrocarbons as all previously known earthly reserves. Unfortunately, they're on Titan.

I don't expect this announcement to have much impact on the petroleum futures market.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:34 PM

The Empty Suit

I frankly don't get all the Obamamania. But then, I never got all of the talk about Bill Clinton's charisma, either. And to be fair, I never understood what the big deal was with Ronald Reagan, the great communicator. I guess I'm more into substance than style. I'm more interested in what people say than in how they say it.

Anyway, given the nature of his career, it's certainly a legitimate point to question his experience and qualifications as president (ignoring the minimal constitutional requirements of native born and thirty-five years old). His speeches remind me of Gertrude Stein's comment about Oakland--there's no there there.

So is there more to it than his speeches? Well, he's apparently left no paper trail to discern his views on much of anything:

A simple question: Does anyone know whether Obama, while serving on the Harvard Law Review from 1989-91, published anything? The law students on the Review all have the right to publish at least one piece (typically they publish at least their third-year papers, which they have to write anyway), and many publish at least two pieces. It would seem surprising if Obama published nothing at all in the very Review over which, he has so often boasted, he presided as President.
If Obama published NOTHING, that would tend to reinforce the contemporaneous impressions of his fellow editors (at least those a year behind him) that while "likeable enough" (to borrow a phrase), he was basically lazy in carrying out his duties. See my earlier comments here and here. It would be interesting if he was so lazy he didn't publish anything during the two years he served on the Review -- not even a short case comment or book review.

(Apparently, judged by the objective results of his work (later scholarly citations to the volume which he oversaw), Obama was the worst president of the Harvard Law Review in the past 20 years -- there was a huge drop in the citations to the volume he produced compared to the years just before, and just after, he served as president. See here.
In his recent interview on "60 Minutes" (see here, about 2:50 into the video), Obama conceded that other than his Review presidency he has no executive experience -- that the Review is the only thing he's ever run, setting aside his own senate office and his campaign. Analyzing his job performance on the Review thus seems like a legitimate, indeed important, task.)

(Follow my link to follow the commenter's links)

So, his only executive experience is running a law school magazine, and not with any apparently distinguishment.

Here's something else disturbing. He hasn't performed that well in debates. His primary accomplishment, and talent, seems to be to make vaporous but inspiring (to some) speeches, that make (supposedly) grown men swoon and get funny feelings up their legs (are you sure that wasn't something running down your leg, Chrissie?). And when he doesn't have a teleprompter, apparently even his speeches aren't all that great:

...the liberal commentators have gushed their praise nearly every time Obama has opened his mouth before a Teleprompter the past few months
It was thus interesting to see Obama climb to the stage at Virginia's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on Saturday night. As he strode to the podium, Obama clutched in his hands a pile of 3 by 5 index cards. The index cards meant only one thing--no Teleprompter.

Shorn of his Teleprompter, we saw a different Obama. His delivery was halting and unsure. He looked down at his obviously copious notes every few seconds throughout the speech. Unlike the typical Obama oration where the words flow with unparalleled fluidity, he stumbled over his phrasing repeatedly.

The prepared text for his remarks, as released on his website, sounded a lot like a typical Obama speech. All the Obama dramatis personae that we've come to know so well were there--the hapless family that had to put a "for sale" sign on its front lawn, the factory forced to shutter its doors and, of course, the mother who declares bankruptcy because "she cannot pay her child's medical bills."

The tone was also vintage Obama. The prepared text reached out to all Americans, including (gasp!) Republicans. It also evidenced Obama's signature lack of anger. While his colleagues have happily demagogued complex issues and demonized the Bush administration, Obama always has taken pains to strike a loftier tone.

But Saturday night's stem-winder turned out quite differently from the typical Obama speech. With no Teleprompter signaling the prepared text, Obama failed to deliver the speech in his characteristically flawless fashion. He had to rely on notes. And his memory. And he improvised.

I'd suggest reading the whole thing.

So, does he even write the speeches? If so, then he must be more aware at the time he's writing them how important the tone is. It seems to me, though, if there's a big difference in tone between a read speech and an extemporaneous one, that someone else, who better understands the nature of his campaign and appeal, is writing them. And when you take away the magic words, the magic candidate disappears as well, and his true voice emerges.

If this is the case, then we are on the brink of taking a cipher, with no notable accomplishments in running anything, who is persuasive and compelling as a speaker only when reading others' words, and putting him in charge of the armed forces and other government institutions of the most powerful nation in the history of mankind.

Is this really a good idea?

As I've said before, the Dems grossly overestimate their chances of regaining the White House this year. Both of their remaining candidates are seriously flawed, in different ways. If you look at the last few decades of presidential elections, the Democrats have won resoundingly only once--in 1964, when the Republicans ran someone perceived to not only be, but someone who was proud to be, an extremist. Since then, the few times the Dems have won have been in very close races. Jimmy Carter might have lost in 1976 if Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon, and made the foolish faux pas about Poland in the second debate. Bill Clinton couldn't have gotten into the White House without the help of Ross Perot. People forget that he only got 43% of the vote in 1992. The only reason he won was because George Bush only got 39%. Even in 1996, he couldn't muster a majority--even in beating Bob Dole, he only got 49+%.

Maybe that long jinx is about to be broken, but it sure doesn't look to me like they have the candidates to do it this year.

[Late afternoon update]

Is Obama a liberal fascist?

I think the most obvious place to start is whether Obama is promoting something like a political religion. The messianic nature of Obama's campaign has been noted by many for a long time now. He often sounds like he's reviving the social gospel. There's even a website called "Is Barack Obama the Messiah?"
Many of the tropes of a political religion/liberal fascism are evident. He exalts unity as it's own reward. His talk of starting new and starting over often sounds like more than merely "turning the page" on the Bush-Clinton years. It sounds a bit like starting at Year Zero.

But what I find most intriguing is his rhetoric of destiny and "choseness." He often makes it sound like he has been selected by forces of providence or God or simply history for this moment. He is, in Oprah's words, "The One." But even more interesting, he tells voters they are the ones. "This is it," Obama proclaimed on Super Tuesday. "We are the ones we've been waiting for, we are the change that we seek." That's pretty oracular stuff.

Well, there's little doubt that Hillary is.

[Early evening update]

Leon Wieseltier has some related thoughts:

...into this unirenic environment strides Obama, pledging to extract us promptly from Iraq and to negotiate with our enemies. What is the role of a conciliator in an unconciliating world? You might think that in such conditions he is even more of an historical necessity-but why would you think that all that stands between the world and peace is one man? George W. Bush was not single-handedly responsible for getting us into our strategic mess and Barack Obama will not be single-handedly responsible for getting us out of it. There are autonomous countries and cultures out there. The turbulence that I have described is not caused by misunderstandings. It is caused by the interests of powers and the beliefs of peoples. Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Islamabad, Gaza City, Khartoum, Caracas-does Obama really believe that he has something to propose to these ruthless regimes that they have not already considered? Does he plan to move them, to organize them, to show them change they can believe in? With what trick of empathy, what euphoria, does he hope to join the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds in Iraq? Yes, he made a "muscular" speech in Chicago last spring; but I have been pondering his remarks about foreign policy in the ensuing campaign and I do not detect the hardness I seek, the disabused tone that the present world warrants. My problem is not with "day one": nobody is perfectly prepared for the White House, though the memory of Bill Clinton's "learning curve" is still vivid, which in Bosnia and Rwanda cost more than a million lives. My problem is that Obama's declarations in matters of foreign policy and national security have a certain homeopathic quality. He seems averse to the hurtful, expensive, traditional, unedifying stuff.

Indeed.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:32 AM

Wrong Analogy

The inevitability about Hillary Clinton seems to be becoming an inevitability of her defeat in the primaries. Ron Fournier has a piece about her abandonment by her former allies/cronies/sycophants as Obama continues to build momentum:

"If (Barack) Obama continues to win .... the whole raison d'etre for her campaign falls apart and we'll see people running from her campaign likes rats on a ship," said Democratic strategist Jim Duffy, who is not aligned with either campaign.

Actually, I think that a better analogy would be a sinking ship abandoning a pair of rats.

But I think that he underestimates both the power and the ruthlessness of the Clintons. Perhaps after losing enough primaries, she'll bow out, but if so, I'll be very surprised. She's been working for this for decades, and I don't think that she'll give up without a very vicious fight, including a convention fight to seat the Michigan and Florida delagates, and a lot of behind-the-scenes pressure. In addition, we don't know how many FBI files they actually had access to back in the nineties, or whose they were, or what was in them. It's certainly conceivable that this is a weapon that they can hold over the head of the super delegates.

And even if she ends up not getting the nomination, I suspect that the Democrats will still have an ugly election in the fall. There are many ways that Billary can sabotage Obama's run without it being obvious that that's their intent (just as in fact Bill may have sabotaged Hillary's primary campaign, perhaps out of fear of being shown up by his wife as president). After all, if he wins, it makes it a lot harder for her to make another attempt in 2012. No matter who wins the nomination, I won't be surprised, nor will I be displeased, to see the civil war within the Democrat Party (that was started by the Clintons) continue.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:15 AM

An Argument For Home Schooling

Here we have something that might happen more often than you think: a retired teacher who was illiterate until the age of forty eight:

"When I was a child I was just sort of just moved along when I got to high school I wanted to participate in athletics. At that time in high school I went underground. I decided to behave myself and do what it took. I started cheating by turning in other peoples' paper, dated the valedictorian, and ran around with college prep kids," said Corcoran.
"I couldn't read words but I could read the system and I could read people," adds Corcoran.

He stole tests and pursuaded friends to complete his assignments. Corcoran earned an athletic scholarship to Texas Western College. He said his cheating intensified, claiming he cheated in every class.

"I passed a bluebook out the window to a friend I painstakingly copied four essay questions off the board in U.S. government class that was required, and hoped my friend would get it back to me with the right answers," Corcoran said.

In 1961, Corcoran graduated with a bachelor's degree in education, while still illiterate he contends. He then went on to become a teacher during a teacher shortage.

"When I graduated from the university, the school district in El Paso, where I went to school, gave almost all the college education graduates a job," said Corcoran.

What does this say about:

His primary school?
His high school?
The college that accepted him?
Schools of "Education" in general?
The school in which he taught for seventeen years?

He isn't impressed:

In retrospect, Corcoran said, his deceit took him a long time to accept.
"As a teacher it really made me sick to think that I was a teacher who couldn't read. It is embarrassing for me, and it's embarrassing for this nation and it's embarrassing for schools that we're failing to teach our children how to read, write and spell!"

No kidding.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:02 AM

IE Tips

For those who don't want to use a good browser, or are forced by draconian IT policies at work to use Internet Exploder, here is a description of some plug-ins for it that may make it almost as useful as Firefox.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:55 AM

February 12, 2008
No Thynge Coold Plese Me Moore

...than a blogge by Sir Iowahawke on that ArchBisheoppe Of Canterbeerry:

25 Sayeth the pilgryms to Bishop Rowan,
26 "Father, we do not like howe thynges are goin'.

27 You know we are as Lefte as thee,

28 But of layte have beyn chaunced to see

29 From Edinburgh to London-towne

30 The Musslemans in burnoose gowne

31 Who beat theyr ownselfs with theyr knyves

32 Than goon home and beat theyr wyves

33 And slaye theyr daughtyrs in honour killlynge

34 Howe do we stoppe the bloode fromme spillynge?"

35 The Bishop sipped upon hys tea

36 And sayed, "an open mind must we

37 Keep, for know thee well the Mussel-man

38 Has hys own laws for hys own clan

39 So question not hys Muslim reason

40 And presaerve ye well social cohesion."

Reade, thee, the reste.

It cood be only the product of an undhimmified English major.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:16 PM

Honest Abe

I know that no one knows or cares any more, with that abomination known as "Presidents Day" (we're supposed to honor Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce along with Washington and Lincoln?), but today is Lincoln's birthday, something that we actually observed when I was a kid.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:44 AM

The War Has Already Started In Europe

They just don't realize it. And they don't realize they're losing, though many, particularly in the UK, are starting to.

Spengler, on Europe in the Dar Al-Harb.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:50 AM

Losing His Marbles

I have to agree with Derb:

I've always liked Ben's stuff -- used to read his diary in The American Spectator way back in the 1970s. Smart, funny, worldly guy, with just that endearing streak of eccentricity. I'm sorry to see he's lost his marbles.

Me, too. Some conservatives have this very strange blind spot when it comes to evolution.

[Update a few minutes later]

Derb eviscerates Stein's thesis. As is usually the case, his attack on evolution (or as he calls it, "Darwinism") is founded on a profound ignorance of the subject.

[Late afternoon update]

Well, this is a heck of a way to celebrate the old man's 199th birthday:

Florida's department of education will vote next week on a new science curriculum that could be in jeopardy, because some conservative counties oppose it.
Nine of Florida's 64 counties have passed resolutions over the last two months condemning the new curriculum that explicitly calls for teaching evolution. The resolutions, passed in heavily Christian counties in the state's northern reaches, demand that evolution be "balanced" with alternative theories, mainly creationist.

That's not really Florida. It's more like deep southern Georgia, culturally...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:01 AM

The Final Mission

Michael Totten writes about the last stages of the war in Fallujah, and Anbar:

According to planet-wide conventional wisdom, United States soldiers and Marines are on an abusive rampage in Iraq. Relentless media coverage of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib - which really did occur, but which the United States didn't sanction or tolerate - seriously distorted what actually goes on in Iraq most of the time. The United States military is far from perfect and is hardly guilt-free, but it's the most law-abiding and humane institution in Iraq at this time.
"Human rights are legal tools in the hands of citizens against abuse of power by an oppressive state," Lieutenant Montgomery said. "If human rights are not respected, sooner or later it will lead to violence and instability...Human rights are rights that derive from the inherent dignity and worth of the person, and they are universal, inalienable, and equal. They are the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace. They belong to people simply because they are human." Again, he read from it the white board. All Iraqi Police officers in Al Anbar are exposed to this material.

...I've said before that American soldiers and Marines aren't the bloodthirsty killers of the popular (in certain quarters) imagination, and that they are far less racist against Arabs than average Americans. They are also, famously, less racist against each other, and they have been since they were forcibly integrated after World War II. This is due to sustained everyday contact with each other and with Iraqis. The stereotype of the racist and unhinged American soldier and Marine is itself a bigoted caricature based almost entirely on sensationalist journalism and recklessly irresponsible war movies.

Liberal journalist George Packer has spent a lot of time in Iraq and is a reliable critic of the Bush Administration and the war. He, like me, has his opinions and doesn't conceal them. But he reports what he sees honestly and comprehensively. You can trust him whether you agree with his views or not.

In a current World Affairs article he pans some of Hollywood's recent anti-war box office flops. "[T]he films...present the war as incomprehensible mayhem," he wrote, "and they depict American soldiers as psychopaths who may as well be wearing SS uniforms. The G.I.s rape, burn, and mutilate corpses, torture detainees, accelerate a vehicle to run over a boy playing soccer, wantonly kill civilians and journalists in firefights, humiliate one another, and coolly record their own atrocities for entertainment. Have these things happened in Iraq? Many have. But in the cinematic version of the war, these are the only things that happen in Iraq. At a screening of The Situation, I was asked to discuss the film with its director, Philip Haas. Why had he portrayed the soldiers in cartoon fashion, I wondered. Why had he missed their humor, their fear, their tenderness for one another and even, every now and then, for Iraqis? Because, Haas said, he wanted to concentrate on humanizing his Iraqi characters instead."

It's not hard to humanize Iraqis and Americans. A competent writer or director can do both at the same time. In fact, it requires deliberate effort or willful ignorance for a writer or director to humanize Iraqis while at the same time dehumanizing Americans. Packer humanizes both because he's a good writer, he's honest, and he actually works in Iraq. He leaves his fortified hotel compound and makes an effort to get it right, unlike so many writers, directors, and journalists in the stereotype-manufacturing industries.

As is often the case, conventional wisdom isn't necessarily wise, or correct. The press, both foreign and American, has not acquitted itself well in Iraq. That is the real failure over there, contrary to what Nancy and Harry continue to ignorantly (and cynically) bleat about.

Read the whole thing, and support real reporters like Michael Totten with his tip jar.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:28 AM

More Stem Cell Advances

This stuff really is moving along at a good clip:

"Our reprogrammed human skin cells were virtually indistinguishable from human embryonic stem cells," said Plath, an assistant professor of biological chemistry, a researcher with the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research and lead author of the study. "Our findings are an important step towards manipulating differentiated human cells to generate an unlimited supply of patient specific pluripotent stem cells. We are very excited about the potential implications."
The UCLA work was completed at about the same time the Yamanaka and Thomson reports were published. Taken together, the studies demonstrate that human iPS cells can be easily created by different laboratories and are likely to mark a milestone in stem cell-based regenerative medicine, Plath said.

Repeatability--one of the hallmarks of solid science. Of course, they always have the standard caveat:

"It is important to remember that our research does not eliminate the need for embryo-based human embryonic stem cell research, but rather provides another avenue of worthwhile investigation."

I think that, at some point, the embryo work will be abandoned, because even for many researchers, it's ethically problematic. But they will have to do a lot of correlation and validation before they can get to that point.

In any event, stuff like this brings us much closer to escape velocity.

[Via Fight Aging]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:08 AM

Overblown Headline

Sorry, but there's nothing classified about the Space Shuttle, as this silly headline implies:

Former Boeing Engineer Charged with Economic Espionage in Theft of Space Shuttle Secrets for China

If one reads the article, what is really at issue is Rockwell (now Boeing) trade secrets--that is, proprietary information, presumably on things like materials and manufacturing techniques. Language like this simply reinforces the mistaken notion of many that NASA, and the Shuttle program, are military in nature. Not that that excuses the spy, of course--he should still be prosecuted, because in theory, it could help the Chinese advance their technology. Though in the case of the Shuttle, as Charles Lurio notes in an email, it will probably set them back ten years.

Of course, if we really wanted to set them back and keep them planet bound, we'd send them the current plans for Ares and Orion...

[Update a few minutes later]

Just in case anyone is wondering, while this guy presumably worked in Downey during the eighties, I never knew him, or even heard of him, until now.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:55 AM

A Billion Here, A Billion There

There's an interesting post on military aircraft procurement over at Winds of Change today (interesting if you're interested in such things, that is).

Norm Augustine, former head of Martin Marietta (now part of Lockheed Martin) wrote an amusing (and insightful) book back in the eighties called "Augustine's Laws" (it's now on its sixth edition, last published about a decade ago). One of the things he did was to plot the growth in cost of military fighters over the decades since the war, and extrapolate it out. He predicted that in some year of the twenty-first century, the military would be able to only afford a single multi-purpose aircraft, and the Air Force and Navy would have to share it.

One point made in comments over there is that the reason these things cost so much per unit (I was shocked to read that the Raptor is a third of a billion dollars per unit) is because it includes amortization of the development and fixed production costs--if they had decided to purchase the originally planned seven hundred, the price per aircraft would be much lower. The problem is that, though we get more bang for the buck, we never want to spend that many bucks.

We did the same thing with the Shuttle. It was about a five-billion-dollar development program, in seventies dollars, but when the fleet size was cut from seven to five during Carter-Mondale (Mondale actually wanted to completely kill the program) as a cost saving, the price per orbiter went up a good bit. It would have probably only cost an additional billion or so to get the two extra vehicles, and we'd be in a lot better shape now (all other events since being equal) with a remaining fleet of five, instead of three. Having had two more might have made us more willing to continue to press forward even in the face of the losses, because even if the president hadn't decided to end the program next year, we'd probably have to do it anyway, particularly if we lost one more, and had only two left. In fact, one of the few smart moves made on the program in the eighties was to order "structural spares" (things like the titanium keel and spar) before the production was shut down and tooling dismantled. That allowed us to build Endeavor after Challenger, something that would not have been possible otherwise, and in the absence of that new vehicle, we'd have been down to two after the Columbia loss.

We're not just penny-wise pound-foolish in production. The Shuttle has a similar problem in ops. If we'd had more vehicles, and made the investment in facilities for them, we could have doubled the flight rate, without that much of an increase in annual fixed costs (perhaps a billion more a year). Which would have been a better deal: four flights a year for three billion a year (a typical number), resulting in a cost of three quarters of a billion per flight, or eight flights a year for four billion, with a cost of half a billion per flight?

Neither number is attractive, but the taxpayer would have gotten a lot more for the money if the purse strings had been loosened on the program. It might have made it a lot more sustainable.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:53 AM

February 11, 2008
Down A Big Cup Of Duuuhhhh

Some intelligence agencies are starting to think that maybe bin Laden hasn't been alive for a long time:

Questions about Bin Laden are being raised by intelligence officials who say that without a specific time mark with a photo of Bin Laden, his presence cannot be confirmed and the most recent statements could have been put together from older audio.

Yes, and that has been true since Tora Bora. Haven't these people ever wondered, or speculated why bin Laden, who was second only to Senator Schumer when it came to being a camera hog, all of a sudden switched from video to audio about six years ago? Even if he said things that seemed to indicate knowledge of recent events, that could have been done by splicing and manipulating an audio tape, or finding someone to imitate his voice. Maybe they've been using voice prints, but I don't know how reliable they really are. I do know that it's a lot harder to fake a video, and when I consider the fact that we've heard only audios, and not seen a new video (at least one that can be shown to be from a post-2002 period) I have long thought that he's been pushing up poppies since then.

Of course, the other reason that I've long thought that he's dead is that our so-called intelligence agencies--the same ones that subverted our pressure on Iran last fall with their "intelligence" estimate that they're not building a bomb--have continued to tell me that he's alive. To me, the question is not whether or not he's alive, but why so many in the so-called intelligence community have been so determined to continue to attempt to convince us that he is for the past six years.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:23 PM

The Cairing Party

The misspelling is deliberate:

Perhaps some members of Congress had been fooled by CAIR's deception. But now they have no excuse. Now Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who saluted CAIR's "important work," and Sen. Paul Sarbanes, who applauded "CAIR's mission," know better.
The criminal briefing should also disabuse Rep. John Conyers, who's trumpeted CAIR's "long and distinguished history." Rep. John Dingell, who said "my office door is always open" to CAIR, now has an obligation to slam it shut.

No red-blooded American lawmaker wants to do anything that would facilitate the support of terrorists, not even Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who's gushed "CAIR has much to be proud of."

And shame on the (much fewer) Republicans on the list as well.

Moderate American Muslims need to form and promote an organization that truly speaks for them, and not for radicals and terrorism. But if they do, will the Democrats pay any attention, or will they remain enthralled with CAIR?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AM

The Big Lie Continues

I don't generally agree with Paul Krugman (to put it mildly) and in fact I don't agree with much in this piece, either, except for one thing:

I'm not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.

But the real reason I put this post up is to note the lie that will not die (mostly because the media liars, or at least deranged, such as Krugman, who may actually believe it, continue to promulgate it).

The prime example of Clinton rules in the 1990s was the way the press covered Whitewater. A small, failed land deal became the basis of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar investigation, which never found any evidence of wrongdoing on the Clintons' part, yet the "scandal" became a symbol of the Clinton administration's alleged corruption.

There was abundant evidence of wrongdoing found, and it can be found in Bob Ray's report. The fact that he chose not to indict was not because there wasn't "any" evidence. It was because he didn't think that he had enough (and indeed, he may have thought that no amount would have been enough) to successfully prosecute and convict them, given the fact that it would only take a single Clinton cultist to hang a jury, as happened in the Susan MacDougal case.

Just to clarify the record. I won't bother to fisk the rest of Krugman's Clinton-defending nonsense today.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:09 AM

February 10, 2008
Boo Hoo

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is very demoralized:

In the Anbar document, the author describes an al-Qaida in crisis, with citizens growing weary of militants' presence and foreign fighters too eager to participate in suicide missions rather than continuing to fight, said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. military spokesman.
"We lost cities and afterward, villages ... We find ourselves in a wasteland desert," Smith quoted the document as saying.

The memo cites militants' increasing difficulty in moving around and transporting weapons and suicide belts because of better equipped Iraqi police and more watchful citizens, Smith said.

The author of the diary seized near Balad wrote that he was once in charge of 600 fighters, but only 20 were left "after the tribes changed course"_ a reference to how many Sunni tribesmen have switched sides to fight alongside the Americans, Smith said.

No thanks to Harry or Nancy. This is a real problem for the press. There may not be enough foreign fighters left to create the new Tet that they're dying to report.

[Update early afternoon]

The WaPo has more detailed account. Apparently the diary was from the October time period.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:29 AM

What Would He Know About It?

George Bush says that John McCain is a true conservative. This, from the guy who said "when people hurt, the government has to move," and who teamed up with (and got rolled by) Ted Kennedy to dramatically expand the federal government's role in education.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:11 AM

Men Are Different Than Women

If they weren't, this joke wouldn't be funny.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:29 AM

February 09, 2008
Obsolete

It's the end of an era. Polaroid is ceasing production of instant film. I hadn't noticed, but they stopped manufacturing the cameras a couple years ago.

I remember back in the sixties when we got one. It seemed pretty cool at the time, but it's not a technology that could survive the digital era. I'm actually a little surprised that it lasted as long as it did.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:50 AM

Fascists To The Left Of Me

Matthew Franck liked Jonah's book:

Edmund Burke in 1775, in what seems to be the first defense of partisanship in Western political thinking, argued that party loyalty and striving for victory over one's opponents is a good thing, so long as loyalty to one's own did not lead each party to attempt the "proscription" of the other. My second and last question prompted by Jonah's Liberal Fascism is, how real is the prospect that one of our parties may try to proscribe the other. And which is more likely to try it?

It is a standard charge of left-wingers who claim to see "fascists" on the right that conservatives want to crack down on dissent and stifle freedom of political speech. But if, as Jonah powerfully argues, our fascists are liberals and many of our liberals are fascists--while fascism is much more weakly present (if at all) on the right--then it should not be surprising that we find the left to be the maker of speech codes, hate crimes laws, political correctness, indoctrination programs in all levels of education, campaign finance "reform," and so on. Can anyone recall any similar campaigns by conservatives for the repression of dissent in the last several generations? (And no, efforts to revive now-lost prohibitions on obscenity and pornography don't count.) Proscription of its opponents' views--a classic great-party gambit by those who wish to unmake and remake regime-question settlements--seems to be the agenda of the American left, not of the right.

It's not just fascism that is redefined by the book, but the words "left" and "right" as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:34 AM

February 08, 2008
Uh Oh

A post that I just put up today is now in the top ten (number eight, right now) of a Google search for "Mike Griffin NASA." And I didn't even get an Instalink on it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:56 PM

Happy Birthday, Chuck!

Alan Boyle has a roundup of links about Darwin's birthday. I don't have much to say right now, except that his theory is probably the most controversial, and most misunderstood (and most powerful as well, in many senses) in the history of science.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:52 PM

Progress In Longevity

I don't know if there's much point to living ten times as long if you're a nematode, but if it works for us, too, Methuselah, here we come.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:33 PM

I Couldn't Even Begin To Guess

Test your knowledge of collectivists.

It's just as much of a challenge as trying to distinguish between passages of the Unibomber's manifesto and Earth In The Balance.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:21 PM

Size Does Matter

Half of UK men would give up sex for six months for a fifty-inch television.

You know, if that's the deal, considering the first twenty years of my life, someone owes me a screen the size of a drive-in theater.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:05 PM

Then And Now

Who's got it right, the Mike Griffin of today, or the Mike Griffin of five years ago?

In the 1950s and 1960s, the term "man rating" was coined to describe the process of converting the military Redstone, Atlas, and Titan II vehicles to the requirements of manned spaceflight. This involved a number of factors such as pogo suppression, structural stiffening, and other details not particularly germane to today's expendable vehicles. The concept of "man rating" in this sense is, I believe, no longer very relevant.

Does he still agree with this congressional testimony?

Now to be fair, he may not be saying that Atlas isn't safe enough--he expresses interest in using it for COTS. The problem, as Jon Goff points out at the Space Politics thread, is that he's chosen an architecture that replicates Apollo, which requires a large CM and SM on a single launch. If one is willing to break these up into separate launches, an EELV can handle it easily. But instead of spending his budget getting flight rate up and launch costs down, and doing the R&D necessary to learn how to truly become spacefaring (e.g., space assembly, docking/mating, propellant storage and transfer), he wants to relive the days of von Braun.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:33 PM

If This Isn't Fascism...

...what is it?

Toward the end of his speech, Dr. Suzuki said that "we can no longer tolerate what's going on in Ottawa and Edmonton" and then encouraged attendees to hold politicians to a greater green standard.
"What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act," said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

[Afternoon update]

Apparently, such is the threat from global warming that we'll have to sacrifice democracy on its altar:

[T]he authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power.

Well, that's a relief.

Actually, there's a bunch of good stuff like this over at Jonah's Liberal Fascism blog today. Just keep a scrollin.' Including Joshua Lederberg's thoughts on letting scientists run things.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:12 AM

Amazing Photo

A dew-covered dragon fly.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:04 AM

Unlatched

I was having a pretty good day, just having finished a successful auction, found my missing coat that I left at a restaurant, narrowly avoided a parking ticket, and was passed by a highway patrolman who was after someone else. I got the last seat on an early flight home to Austin on American from Bradley Airport through Dallas.

About 45 minutes out from DFW, the captain explained that the luggage door in the back of the plane was unlatched. The captain said, in effect, "While this isn't a problem now due to the pressurization holding the door in place, it will be once the plane is about to land." So we were told to expect some emergency vehicles on the tarmac to spot any luggage so it wouldn't get in the way of other planes.

I never trust pilots to tell the truth to passengers in an emergency-landing situation so I called my wife to tell her I loved her just in case (I did this before it was fashionable on one other emergency landing due to a tail screw problem about 10 years ago). No one else seemed nervous. The flight attendants seemed pretty upbeat. I pondered the seat back that was not upright in front of me, but I would rather die than commit a faux pas, so I waited for the flight attendant to attend to it.

When we landed, I counted 9 emergency vehicles on the right side of the plane. We stopped on the tarmac for about 5 minutes and they circled us. Then we headed for the gate. When we made a turn, I could see about six of them following behind the plane. We arrived at the terminal safely. We had probably delayed all of DFW traffic for a time.

On my flight to Austin, the next pilot missed our gate and had to do a 360 turn to get back to it. That was a pretty weird trip.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 07:45 AM

Clean Ascent

Looks like there were no tile problems yesterday, and the ECO sensors performed as advertised.

It's kind of ironic that they seem to have finally wrung some of the last bugs out of the system just before they're going to retire it.

You know, given what a technical and economic disaster ESAS is turning out to be, I could be persuaded to extend Shuttle past 2010 at this point, and just wait for the private sector to take over its duties, particularly if the money would go toward a propellant depot and the development of lunar injection and landing hardware. I don't know what it would take to resurrect the contracts and production lines that have been shut down, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:30 AM

Blogging The Chicago Auto Show

...as only Iowahawk can.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:23 AM

More Fur On The Dinosaurs

There's an interesting article over at the New Scientist (via Clark Lindsey, and including a quote by Jon Goff) on human rating the Atlas for Bob Bigelow.

One comment I have:

One requirement is to make the rocket more robust against failures. The goal is to have enough redundancies that the rocket could survive two simultaneous failures of any of its parts. Another is to have an emergency detection system that could sense problems and abort a launch when required.

The second requirement is the most critical, and is what really lies at the heart of human rating (a subject that I have ranted about occasionally).

If the vehicle doesn't currently have enough redundancy to be reliable, then the satellite insurance companies should be asking Lockheed Martin why it doesn't--their clients' satellites aren't cheap, and they expect, for the price they're paying, them to end up in orbit and not at the bottom of the Atlantic. No, I think that the real issue is FOSD (Failure On-Set Detection), which doesn't currently exist on the EELVs other than for range-safety destruct purposes. Fortunately, the failure modes of a liquid-engined vehicle like the Atlas tend to be fairly benign, at least for propulsion, with ample warning if the right sensors are in place (much more so, in fact, than for the SRB which, while it has never had any in-flight failures, if it does, they're more likely to be unexpected and sudden).

Anyway, let's talk about The Gap, the one that Babs Mikulski and Kay Bailey Hutchison think is so critical to "national security" (at least Senator Hutchison, though she never explains exactly how) that NASA must get an extra couple billion dollars to close it.

What gap is that? The only gap will be that of NASA's inability to put up astronauts on their own new launch vehicle, based on a flawed concept, that's turning out to not be "safe," "simple," or "soon," as originally advertised. As far as I can tell, as Bigelow and Lockheed Martin's plans continue to move forward, either with a Dragon or Dreamchaser, (and possibly with the use of a Falcon 9, should Elon finally get it flying) there will be no gap. Americans will be able to fly into space, and probably even to the ISS (unless NASA refuses to certify the vehicles as meeting their Visiting Vehicle Requirements, which are similar to "human rating" as a means for NASA to arbitrarily exclude anyone it wants from its playground). They just won't do it on Ares or with Orion. So there will be no "gap."

And of course, I speculated at the time of the announcement that this has to be really pissing off supporters of Ares, Orion and the ESAS within NASA. It was confirmed to me a month or so later by someone fairly high in the Atlas program that this was indeed the case, and that there was even unhappiness within Lockmart about it, but that Orion and Atlas (and ULA) are two different organizations, and the latter has to find customers. This unhappiness came out publicly the other day, when Mike Griffin blamed Lockheed Martin for the recent criticism of his pet launcher.

It couldn't possibly be any technical deficiencies of the concept, no, it's just parochial carping by evil capitalists. As I replied to Mark Whittington in comments over at Space Politics, John Logsdon's comment that the criticism was about "ego and profits" is laughable, as though Mike Griffin and NASA officials have no egos, and as though ATK and Boeing are building the vehicle pro bono, and not taking any of the taxpayers' money.

In any event, it doesn't really matter in the long run. Ares will stumble on as long as this administrator is in place, and in a year or so when the new president is replacing him and reviewing space policy in general, it's likely that even further progress will have been made by Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, SpaceDev and Bigelow, and it will be increasingly clear that "The Gap" is an invention of people who simply want to be able to build NASA vehicles with the taxpayers' funds, and it will probably be the end of ESAS, and the beginning of a more rational policy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Based on further related discussion at Space Politics, John Logsdon apparently didn't even say what Mark claims he did. What a surprise.

[Early afternoon update]

Jon has more thoughts, as does Clark:

The fundamental problem is Griffin's insistence on building new launchers to fit his exploration architecture rather than fitting an architecture to existing launchers (and to soon-to-be-existing ones like Falcon 9). Yes, a robust lunar program might require development of some new technology slightly beyond what's currently on the shelf such as fuel depots and in-space refueling but that is what we should expect an R&D agency to do. The next time NASA astronauts go to the Moon, they should get there via a program that actually advances the state of the art of spaceflight rather than via a retro-architecture that "proves" to everyone yet again how impractical and unsustainable human spaceflight is.

Indeed. As I wrote over at Space Politics, to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, with a limited budget, you go to the moon with the launch vehicles you have, not the launch vehicles you'd like to have.

[Early afternoon update]

One other point over at the Space Politics thread:

Griffin also needs some serious legal counsel with regard to his comments to the press. The agency has past and current COTS competitions, not to mention launch service competitions for robotic missions, in which Atlas V has been a proposed launcher. Unless Griffin wants those awards challenged and decisions revisited yet again, he needs to avoid potentially biased statements in the public about specific industry vehicles.

Well, he's an engineer, not a lawyer. Of course, it's part of the intrinsic conflict of interest when you have a government agency competing with the private sector. It's a hole that Mike has put himself into with his approach.

[Early evening update]

For anyone late to this particular party (though with surprisingly few comments), I have a follow-up post.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:10 AM

The Veepstakes

Here's a very interesting thought for McCain to partially neutralize Obama's appeal: Michael Steele. I heard him speak a year ago at the Conservative Summit in DC. He's a very impressive guy. It's a shame he didn't win that Senate race in '06. He came pretty close, for a Republican in Maryland.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:03 AM

The Mystery Remains

Apparently CalOSHA has issued their report, and it remains unclear what caused the explosion at Scaled last summer. Charles Lurio notes (as I've been saying for, well, forever, or at least since I heard about the proposal to go with a nitrous hybrid):

...largely because of its ability to self-detonate - nitrous oxide has every now and then created unhappy surprises whose causes are difficult or impossible to explain. This may turn out to have been the case at Mojave. If in the end no cause for that incident is identifiable, Scaled should perhaps consider an alternative oxidizer for its hybrid; liquid oxygen (LOX) may be less convenient to transport and manage but doesn't have nitrous' particular unpredictabilities.

It also performs much better, whether with hybrids or liquids. This is very bad news. If you don't know what caused an accident, it's very difficult to know how to prevent it from recurring. Even if it causes a delay in the schedule, I think that they will have to go to some other design, and I also think (as I've always thought) that they should subcontract it out to an established propulsion house, such as HMX or XCOR, who are right there on the field.

Maybe when Burt has recovered from his recent health problems, he'll be in better shape to grasp that nettle than he has been.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:54 AM

Disappearing Art

We're losing our movies:

The report's authors state the data explosion could turn into digital movie extinction, unless the studios push the development of storage standards and data management practices that will guarantee long-term access of their content.
As the report points out, even if a 100-year black box were invented that "read data reliably without introducing any errors, required no maintenance and offered sufficient bit density at an affordable price," there would be nobody alive capable of repairing it if that box were to fail at 99 years. In the real world of data management, digital assets are stored on media with longevities much less than 100 years, vulnerable to temperature changes, humidity and static electricity. It can be misidentified, inadequately indexed and difficult to track.

Also, whereas a well-preserved 35mm negative has traditionally contained enough information to fulfill any requirement for ancillary markets, there's a question in the minds of some industry observers about whether the quality of masters archived in digital formats will be sufficient for quality duplication. In an age when home movie systems can often provide a better experience than some commercial theaters, that's not an unimportant concern.

This is a problem that cryonicists face as well. How do you preserve the data that defines your life and identity over an indefinite period of time? No static media can be relied on--they all deteriorate eventually. I know that I have lots of floppies from the eighties that are probably unreadable now.

Data is going to have to be stored dynamically, and continually moved to new systems as the technology evolves. It will also have to be stored holographically, and distributed. Fortunately, the costs of digital data storage are plunging, with terabyte drives now available for the cost of multi-megabytes twenty years ago, and that trend is likely to continue as we get into molecular storage.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:45 AM

Quad Cores For Everyone!

But no ponies. A look at the near future of microprocessors.

I find it amusing that so many people will be using quad-core machines for word processing and email. On the other hand, we'll probably need that kind of processing power to filter all the spam.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:41 AM

Face(book) Value

Jay Garmon dissects a dumb statistical correlation between SAT scores and "favorite" SF&F books. I found it interesting that there were no works by Neil Stephenson on the chart.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:38 AM

Deconstructing McCain

Mickey Kaus is on the job:

McCain said he had "respect" for opponents of his immigration plan (which he didn't renounce) "for I know that the vast majority of critics to the bill based their opposition in a principled defense of the rule of law." Not like those others who base their opposition on bigoted yahoo nativism! McCain's semi-conciliatory words aren't what you say when you really respect your opposition--then you say "I know we have honest disagreements." Not "I know most of you aren't really racists." Even his suckup betrayed how he really feels. Which I suspect is sneering contempt!

He doesn't quite have that faking sincerity thing down.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:11 AM

February 07, 2008
"A Feature, Not A Bug"

T. M. Lutas has some observations on the concern among the military for the modern political class in the west"

...we've always had the best military toys. But that technological line ended with the invention of the nuclear weapon. Once you can destroy the planet, where else is there to go in terms of outright destructiveness? We're trying to continue to improve by enhancing the precision of our violence but in the face of a force that wants terror, imprecision is a feature, not a bug.

Read the whole thing.

The danger we are confronting now is that mass destruction is coming into the hands of individuals, and it's going to continue to get worse. A policy of "non-interventionism" is not just futile, but suicidal, in such a world.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:12 PM

How Well Do You Know Europe?

I only came into the top third. But that was on my first try. I'm sure with practice I could get a lot higher.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:47 PM

A Clue To My MT Problems

I'm getting this error on every page of my management site:

Use of uninitialized value in pattern match (m//) at website/extlib/I18N/LangTags.pm line 394.

I did a Google for that exact error, and only came up with one hit, which wasn't very helpful (I've tried recopying the extlib files, and even wiping out the directory and copying them as new), but it still gives the error.

I will, say, though, that going from 4.01 to 4.1 has cleaned up some of my GUI problems. The big issue at this point is getting it to complete the publishing task without hanging (which is what's causing the time outs when y'all comment).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:30 PM

The Weather Cooperated

The launch seemed to go fine. We looked for it from the house, but I've given up on seeing it from here. I think that the roof line is just too high above the trajectory, when it's heading north up to the ISS. The only launch I've seen from here was an Atlas at night, and it was heading due east, so it wasn't moving away from us as fast. It reminds me, though, that there aren't going to be very many more opportunities to see it. I suspect that it's the largest launch vehicle that we're going to have for a long, long time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:08 PM

No Ten-Year Plans

Ron Bailey has some thoughts on top-down government-driven technology programs:

The motivation behind the Apollo moon shot program was largely geopolitical. The Soviets had launched the first artificial satellite in 1957 and orbited the first man around the planet in 1961. As a NASA history explains, "First, and probably most important, the Apollo program was successful in accomplishing the political goals for which it had been created. Kennedy had been dealing with a Cold War crisis in 1961 brought on by several separate factors--the Soviet orbiting of Yuri Gagarin and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion only two of them--that Apollo was designed to combat." The Apollo program cost $25.4 billion (about $150 billion in current dollars) to land just 12 astronauts on the moon. It is curious that Shellenberger and Nordhaus cite the Apollo program as an example of transformative technologies since it was basically a technological dead end.

Yes, and one that NASA seems determined to repeat.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PM

Best Wishes

It's been rumored for several months that Burt Rutan has been under the weather. He certainly didn't look great when I talked to him briefly in the hallway in Long Beach in September.

Without getting into details, I now have it on very good authority that he underwent (or is undergoing) surgery this morning in California. My understanding is that, if successful, the prognosis will be good, and he'll be doing much better soon. If you're the praying type, and think it does him any good, then you might want to do that. But if you do, it might be best not to tell him. Me, I'll just hope for the best.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:33 AM

Off The Air Temporarily

I've shut down comments (I think) temporarily while I attempt an upgrade from MT-4.01 to MT-4.1, in the modest hope that it will straighten out some of the problems I've been having with timeouts. Hopefully not for long.

[A few minutes later]

OK, I've updated. Let's see if we're still having problems.

[Update a few minutes later]

Nope, still hanging up.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:53 AM

It's A Done Deal

Looks like Romney is pulling out, with a speech at CPAC today. It's probably looking pretty futile to him about now, and he probably doesn't want to squander any more of the family fortune, at least this cycle. I think that the party is going to have to come to terms with the fact that McCain is the candidate, and at least be thankful that it is settled this early, while the Dems may go fighting all the way to Denver.

I also wonder if part of Romney's thinking is that, if he gets out now, he can forestall a deal between McCain and Huckabee to put the latter on the ticket? If so, he is doing an immense favor to the Republican party and conservative movement. I would find it hard enough to vote for McCain. I'd find it impossible to vote for McCain-Huckabee. And I suspect that there are a lot of other people who would feel the same way. I think that McCain's only real hope of shoring up the base at this point is to balance the ticket ideologically (and to make the appropriate conciliatory gestures at CPAC today). I think that a Fred Thompson in the number two spot would be very appealing to a lot of people, and he'd tear up whoever the Dems have as veep candidate in a debate.

[Update at 1:30 PM EST]

It's official:

"This is not an easy decision for me. I hate to lose. My family, my friends and our supporters... many of you right here in this room... have given a great deal to get me where I have a shot at becoming President. If this were only about me, I would go on. But I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, I feel I must now stand aside, for our party and for our country," Romney said.

No word about preempting Huckabee but, then, there's no reason to say anything about it. Let's just hope that it happens.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:27 AM

Regulatory Issues For Virgin

When they made their announcement a couple weeks ago, I was interested to see that the interiors of the two fuselages of White Knight Two and SpaceShipTwo are identical. Virgin implied that they might be selling seats in WK2, either for passengers who just wanted a ride (with parabolas) or for future SS2 passengers. Which had me scratching my head. Had they considered the fact that WK2 is an airplane, not a spaceplane, and that it's in a different regulatory regime?

Maybe not:

The US Federal Aviation Administration has informed Flight that it will require WK2 to be certified before it is used for anything other than as a launch platform for SS2.

If it's a launch platform, then it falls under the launch license process by FAA-AST, but if it is used for other purposes, such as crew training, it is in a different category, and has to be certified by FAA-AVR, the much larger part of the agency that deals with aviation.

I've long been on the war path to get people to use these terms properly, because they really do mean things.

Certifying an aircraft under (presumably) Part 121 (and perhaps even the more stringent Part 127) for commercial passenger transportation (think of it as the FAA equivalent of NASA's elusive "man rating") is a long and expensive process. It can increase the development cost of the vehicle by anywhere from one to two orders of magnitude. As an example, there was a small executive jet was prototyped by Scaled for a couple million a few years ago, but it was estimated that it would cost a couple hundred million to get it certified. Which is one of the reasons that you can't buy one today. It never happened.

Now Virgin Atlantic Airlines is obviously familiar with FAA processes and procedures, and has an operators certificate. But they've never been involved with the development of an aircraft in the way that Virgin Galactic is now. My question is: does their business model account for estimated WK2 certification costs?

Which raises a second question. For this kind of market (informed passenger/adventure travel) is the current FAA certification regime overkill? This is the issue that prevented Zero G from going into operation much sooner--they had a certified aircraft (a Boeing 727) but it wasn't certified for parabolic flight, and they had to spend years and a lot of money (I have no idea how much, but I imagine millions) to get a special type certification for this flight regime. So while we've made good progress in loosening the constraints for space flight, one wonders how much more progress we could have made (and how much less viable WK2 is from a business standpoint) because of our one-size-fits-all aviation regs?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AM

Just In Time To Retire The System

It looks like, over a quarter of a century after Shuttle went into service, they've finally solved the ECO sensor problem. Now, of course, the problem is the weather. I'd bet they don't fly today, just looking at the motion of that front. I wish it would come down here--we need the rain.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:51 AM

Overgrown Children

Lileks has some tart thoughts on those who believe that America sux:

You can picture the satisfied little grins on the authors' faces; you can imagine the whole tableau--the computer (which most people in the world will never touch, let alone use, let alone own) the TV in the corner connected to a network that has channels catering to every taste, the iPod stocked with music hoovered up free of charge without consequence, the fridge stocked with food--the light comes on when you open the door, too, unless it's burned out, and then you go to the store and get another one; they always have another one. The soft bed, the coffee machine, the well-fed pet, the vast panoply of free information and unfettered opinion flowing 24/7 from the internet. You can drink alcohol without being sentenced to death; you can be a girl alone in a room with a man without earning a public stoning; you can stand up in a room and argue for the candidate of your choice without being arrested; you stand in a society that allows for astonishing amounts of freedom, comfort and opportunity. But.

But. Someone somewhere is a practicing Baptist and someone somewhere else is eating a hamburger larger than you'd prefer, and other people are watching cars go around a track at high speed. As your skinny unhappy friend said the other night: people are just too fat and happy. He bites his nails and plays WoW six hours a night, but he has a point. It doesn't matter that these fascists-in-fetal-form never quite seem to accomplish anything; it's not like they drove the gay Teletubbies off the air or had Tony Kushner drawn and quartered in the public square. But they're preventing something. Something wonderful. And they're driving large cars to Wal-Mart and putting 18-roll packs of Charmin in the back and they have three kids. Earth has withstood a lot in its four billion years, but it cannot withstand them. And even if it does, who wants to live in a world where these people don't care that they're being mocked by small, underfunded theaters in honest, gritty neighborhoods? (Which are being gentrified by upwardly-mobile poseurs who have decided it's a great place to live because the theater is good and the restaurants are cheap. F*#*$ing interlopers. But we'll deal with them later.)

Hey, "Murkan Boob"? You're probably too stupid to realize it, but he's talking to you.

I'm tempted, actually, to institute a new comment policy. Anyone who leaves brainless comments anonymously using a "clever" (which is to say, stupid) nickname, off topic, will have posts deleted and the poster will be banned. I'm all for an interesting discussion, but these drive-by cowardly graffiti artists get very tiresome.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:24 AM

February 06, 2008
One Toke Over The Line

Willie Nelson comes out as a Truther.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:18 PM

That Didn't Take Long

John Kerry says that yesterday's tornadoes were caused by global warming.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:51 PM

The Ethics Of Hillary Clinton

Jerry Zeifman reminisces about Watergate:

After President Nixon's resignation a young lawyer, who shared an office with Hillary, confided in me that he was dismayed by her erroneous legal opinions and efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel-as well as an unwillingness to investigate Nixon. In my diary of August 12, 1974 I noted the following:
John Labovitz apologized to me for the fact that months ago he and Hillary had lied to me [to conceal rules changes and dilatory tactics.] Labovitz said, "That came from Yale." I said, "You mean Burke Marshall [Senator Ted Kennedy's chief political strategist, with whom Hillary regularly consulted in violation of House rules.] Labovitz said, "Yes." His apology was significant to me, not because it was a revelation but because of his contrition.

At that time Hillary Rodham was 27 years old. She had obtained a position on our committee staff through the political patronage of her former Yale law school professor Burke Marshall and Senator Ted Kennedy. Eventually, because of a number of her unethical practices I decided that I could not recommend her for any subsequent position of public or private trust.

And now she stands a good chance of becoming the next president.

I never fail to be amazed at how blind people can be to the corruption of these people. Read the whole thing.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:00 AM

Forty Years Later

Remembering the lies of Tet.

As the Washington Post's Saigon bureau chief Peter Braestrup documented in his 1977 book, "The Big Story," the desperate fury of the communist attacks including on Saigon, where most reporters lived and worked, caught the press by surprise. (Not the military: It had been expecting an attack and had been on full alert since Jan. 24.) It also put many reporters in physical danger for the first time. Braestrup, a former Marine, calculated that only 40 of 354 print and TV journalists covering the war at the time had seen any real fighting. Their own panic deeply colored their reportage, suggesting that the communist assault had flung Vietnam into chaos.

Their editors at home, like CBS's Walter Cronkite, seized on the distorted reporting to discredit the military's version of events. The Viet Cong insurgency was in its death throes, just as U.S. military officials assured the American people at the time. Yet the press version painted a different picture.

To quote Braestrup, "the media tended to leave the shock and confusion of early February, as then perceived, fixed as the final impression of Tet" and of Vietnam generally. "Drama was perpetuated at the expense of information," and "the negative trend" of media reporting "added to the distortion of the real situation on the ground in Vietnam."

The North Vietnamese were delighted. On the heels of their devastating defeat, Hanoi increasingly shifted its propaganda efforts toward the media and the antiwar movement. Causing American (not South Vietnamese) casualties, even at heavy cost, became a battlefield objective in order to reinforce the American media's narrative of a failing policy in Vietnam.

Sound familiar?

I fear that Al Qaeda may attempt one more spasm of violence, and the media, ever dutiful to the enemy, wittingly or not, will report it as the war futile and lost in Iraq.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 AM