From Dennis Prager:

Who exactly in the European Union is condemning Israel? Its conservatives? Who in America is condemning Israel? Conservatives? Who in Australia or Canada? Conservatives? Of course not. As regards Israel (and America and much else), the Western world’s moral idiots, to use the term in the title of the Dershowitz column, are virtually all on the left, including and especially many of his colleagues in academia.

So, I have a question for my friend Dershowitz. (I say ‘friend’ because we’ve known each other for years and debated and dialogued together.)

Given that Israel’s security is so important to you, given that you believe that the ability to morally distinguish between Israel and its enemies is tantamount to the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and given that those who condemn Israel for its “disproportionate” response to Hamas terror-rockets are almost all on the left in America and Europe, why do you continue to identify yourself as a man of the left?

As he notes, there has to be a cognitive dissonance going on there. As well as a lot of other complicated issues.

Senator Obama says that if we disagree with him about the virtues of spreading our (or other peoples’) wealth around, that we’re selfish.

Nothing I like better from a socialist presidential candidate than being lectured about my personal morality.

This is one of the weirdest storms in recorded history. Jeff Masters has been calling it “the Joker” for several days because of its unpredictability, but the latest turn–an intensification over land–has him amazed:

It does happen sometimes that the increased friction over land can briefly act to intensify a hurricane vortex, but this effect is short-lived, once the storm is cut off from its oceanic moisture source. To have a storm intensify over land and maintain that increased intensity while over land for 12 hours is hard to explain. The only thing I can think is that recent rains in Florida have formed large areas of standing water that the storm is feeding off of. Fay is also probably pulling moisture from Lake Okeechobee. Anyone want to write a Ph.D. thesis on this case?

We haven’t seen rain for several hours, though the winds continue (though not tropical force). We may still get some more rain out of it before it’s gone; the feeder bands are over the water now, but as it moves farther away they may come back ashore in south Florida. Anyway, we got plenty of rain–enough that I won’t bother to water tomorrow, which the local commissars say is our watering day.

I had to extend a recent business trip and came back a few days later than I intended. I sat down to pay bills and it was the day after one of my credit cards had a payment due. I was hit with a $39 late fee, a $9.95 epay fee, and interest retroactively was jacked up to 21%. All together, I was hit with a charge of 1.27% of my balance for being one day late. That works out to an annual yield of 10,000%. Nice for them. Makes one consider supporting regulation.

Judging from the carbon emitted from eating food in the US, food represents about 5% of the carbon usage. It’s a higher percentage in developing countries, but the power uses of carbon are very valuable and inelastic. By figuring out how to turn food into fuel and doing so for the most expensive fuel at $4.00/gallon, we drive up the price of food to $6 per bushel as a bushel of corn can produce 2.8 gallons of ethanol and $1.42 in ethanol subsidies which has the energy content of 2 gallons of gasoline of which 2/3 of the cost is the petroleum.

So people living on $1/day can only afford 9 pounds of corn if they can find it wholesale in such small lots. 1 pound is 2400 calories. I guess the high corn price is exposing poor financing, competition, distribution and economic incentives in countries with food riots, rather than simply first world corn consumption subsidies.

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.

We just got congratulated by Space Settlement Institute. Download file

We are now accepting Paypal manually. Email paypal purchase requests to paypal@space-shot.com

Here’s my ISDC paper. Download file

Slides. Download file

As long as I’m uploading files, here’s a prediction tutorial. Download file

In the latest issue of Moon Miners’ Manifesto and Ad Astra Peter Kokh makes the point in “Perfect Spot Found for Moonbase?” that R&D for living everywhere except the poles would open up a lot more of the Moon to utilization especially the mare/highland “coastline”. Good point! But let’s do both. Let’s colonize the easiest place to colonize too.

He did say that if the government puts a base at the pole that the rest of the Moon might never get developed. This is an error. In 500 years of 2% growth, the average worker will be able to fund their own Elon Musk-style orbital space program 5 times over with one year’s income. See a comical look into the future here.

Danyel Fisher has a good post on fingerprints and false positives. He doubts the guilt of the Oregon man being held in the Madrid bombings case based on fingerprint evidence – only time will tell for sure, but he does make an excellent point that “…if you are “one in a million,” there are 293 of you in the USA…” False positives will become more and more problematic as more people are fingerprinted. One thing Danyel doesn’t discuss, but which is extremely important, is that the resulting false positives will be believed accurate with a high degree of confidence, making it much harder to convince authorities that they are indeed false positives.

Also worth checking out is the paper linked to at the end of Danyel’s piece: On the Individuality of Fingerprints (pdf).

I don’t often praise Democrats, but I want to point out that there have been at least three who have been acting as statemen, rather than politicians, recently. One is Joe Biden (surprisingly to me, because I’ve never been very impressed with him in the past). A second is Evan Bayh. And a third is Bob Kerrey. It’s a shame that they have to share a party with the likes of Ted Kennedy.

I was also gratified to see Condi Rice amend her previous statement (“Nobody could have imagine using planes as weapons”) which is hands-down the dumbest thing that she’s ever said (and it’s rare for her to say things remotely dumb). She said in this morning’s hearing that she should have said “I couldn’t imagine…”

I also disagree with her that armoring cockpits was the only thing that we might have done to prevent 911. A different attitude toward hijacking by the public would have helped as well. Now that we have the mentality that there are purposes of hijacking beyond extortion–that there are worse things than losing an airplane and its passengers, it will be much more difficult if not impossible to hijack an aircraft, and if we’d somehow had that mentality prior to 911, the towers might still stand.

[Late afternoon update]

Just in case anyone was confused, I was referring to Senator Kerrey’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today, to which I linked above (sorry, registration may be required), not his hectoring performance in the hearings this morning.