He has some…creative…suggestions.

If’s Friday, so that means it’s Victor Davis Hanson day. He describes the sickening and cynical double standard among our friends in old Europe.

Millions are slowly learning how different the United States is from its critics in Europe. France will threaten the awful regime in Libya but only about matters of monetary recompense, in the same manner that money led both it and Germany to trade with Saddam Hussein after 1991 and haggle over oil concessions for the next half century. Neither state would remove a dictator, much less pledge lives and nearly $90 billion to create a democracy in the Middle East. All that is too concrete, too absolute, too unsophisticated for the philosophes, who would always prefer slurring a democracy to castigating some third-world bloody ideologue. The Europeans, remember, are now grandstanding about the need for American “transparency” in the distribution of their paltry few millions in Iraq in a manner that they never demanded of their billions once dumped onto a corrupt Palestinian Authority.

There are bombings regularly in Spain; over 10,000 died in France due to either a defect in its socialist government or indeed in its very national character; and Russia obliterated Grosny. But a single death or bomb in Baghdad alone seems to merit condemnation from the Europeans, whose leaders seem incapable of using the words “victory” and “freedom,” much less “sacrifice” and “liberation.” They may lavish awards and money on a Jimmy Carter or Susan Sontag, who criticize their own country’s efforts in the midst of a deadly war; but the true moralists are those who risk taking on tyrants, not those who carp from the sidelines that such courageous efforts are sometimes messy…

…For some reason Paris and Berlin ? and their American admirers ? think that the reconstruction of Iraq should be perfect in six months, despite the fact that European and U.N. efforts in the Balkans are not perfect after a near decade. Yet it is likely that Saddam Hussein ? on the lam for six months ? will be found more quickly than the odious Radovan Karadzic or Ratko Mladic who, under very suspicious circumstances, are still in hiding inside Europe five years after their hideous regimes collapsed beneath American bombs. And will the Balkans under the U.N. ? 13 years so far since hostilities commenced ? achieve stability more quickly than Iraq under American auspices? Instead, when the post-9/11 war is all over, all of the dead ? Americans, Afghans, and Iraqis ? in the first two years of fighting will prove to be a fraction of those slaughtered in the former Yugoslavia during the decade of European non-fighting. We have seen the European new world order, and its pacifist and socialist utopia leads to Sbrenica and an August of mass death in France.

RTWT

Phil Bowermaster has found it.

Err…at least for him.

In commemoration of its last flight, I have some thoughts on the Concorde, and its potential successors, over at TechCentralStation.

And yes, before anyone comments, I know that it should be “almost three decades,” rather than “over three decades.”

Arnold Kling has a very good article about non-linear thinking. Nothing new (at least to me) but a cogent way of explaining the implications to those for whom it is.

Glenn reminds me of an email we both got from Gary Hudson, about the Methuselah Mouse Prize.

The prize structure is quite clever, and anyone interested in life extension and aging reversal should be supportive of this.

I’m finishing up a column on the Concorde, and have a lot of other things to do, so posting will be light.

Monday is Suborbital Action Day on Capitol Hill. If you’re in the DC area and want to help lobby Congress on this issue, get in touch with the Suborbital Institute. For further info, follow the link.

Thanks for this link from commenters and emailers. It seems that some namby pambies are concerned about sending astronauts to Space Station Albatross, because its environmental systems are breaking down.

I don’t have time for a lot of commentary on this right now, but I’ll make two points.

First, this is the most important factor:

Station astronauts have consistently said they prefer to keep the orbiting facility occupied during the shuttles’ grounding and that they accept the attendant risks and discomfort. Foale and Kaleri are seasoned veterans, Foale having survived a collision and Kaleri a fire during their tours aboard the Russian Mir space station.

I tire of pantywaist politicians and bureaucrats, and those nervous nellies in the public who urge them on, deciding for other people how much risk they should take, particularly when taking risks is part of their job.

Now, I don’t really care if ISS falls into the ocean (though hopefully it will come in without hitting anything with actual value on land), but for people who don’t want to see a hundred-billion-dollar “investment” littering the seabottom, the notion that we should risk letting it do so because we don’t want to risk a couple of astronauts is ludicrous. Human life is priceless and invaluable to people who know and love the particular humans, but it’s not that invaluable. The government manages to put a value on it every day, in myriad ways, and this should be no exception.

But the second point is that this is the almost inevitable result of flawed space policy over the past three decades, in which we developed a fragile monoculture of a space transportation system, with which we’ve now built a fragile monoculture of a single, politically-driven-but-largely-useless facility in orbit.

NASA’s current manned spaceflight programs are largely irrelevant to our nation’s future in space, and any new policy that purports to care about that future must accept this reality, and rethink our entire approach to this frontier.

Here’s a good companion piece to my National Review column about the Chinese space program.

Ed Hudgins says to unleash American private enterprise.