In honor of Dan Goldin’s departure tomorrow, Keith Cowing at NASA Watch (Goldin’s long-time web nemesis) has published this link in honor of the event. Well, I got a chuckle out of it, but Bloom County generally has that effect…

Someone clued me in to this invaluable web page. If you happen to end up with a nutty deconstructionist professor (an all-too-frequent occurrence at any post-modern university, or even small college), it will allow you to spew semiotic nonsense without having to twist your brain coming up with it yourself. The nice thing about it is that it is randomly generated, so each paper is unique, and can’t be found on the web by profs looking for plagiarists. If you need a longer paper, just run it several times and splice the outputs together via cut’n’paste. Don’t worry–doing so won’t accidentally inject any semantic content–it may even reduce it, if that’s possible. But it will read like an “A” paper in Lacanian analysis.

The rumor has been going around since late yesterday afternoon, but now Frank Sietzen at UPI has the story–Sean O’Keefe, currently a deputy at OMB, will be replacing Dan Goldin. O’Keefe has been intimately involved in the ISS budget mess, and given NASA’s inability to manage their programs or their budgets, they could probably do a lot worse than someone from the Office of Management and Budget. I just hope that he’ll have Administration support for the housecleaning that the agency direly needs–he unfortunately probably won’t get it from Congress.

An informed Washington source tells me that we should take any press pronouncements concerning new NASA Administrators with a healthy dose of sodium chloride, for the moment. So perhaps it’s not as done a deal as the reporting would indicate.

Well, according to Spaceref, and based on this White House Press Release, it is a done deal (assuming that the words “the President intends to nominate” imply that the nominee has accepted).

Michael Ledeen has an excellent dose of common sense in today’s Opinion Journal, in which he points out that destroying the Islamofascists will require wholesale revolution in the Middle East, and that’s something at which Americans excel, if we can keep the pinstriped nervous nellies in Foggy Bottom from mucking it up in the name of “stability,” as they did at the end of the Gulf War.

…Yes, I know that our diplomats hate “instability,” but most Americans not only are able to cope with it, they go out of their way to create it. Stability is for those older, burnt-out countries, not for the American dynamo. And chaos is vastly preferable to the vicious tyrannical stability that has crushed and impoverished the people of Afghanistan.

Exactly. Stability is vastly overrated. The Soviet Union was stable for decades. Iraq has been a stable haven for terrorism and dictatorship for the past decade, thank you very much, State Department.

We may need to shift a few borders here and there, and topple a few corrupt regimes, but as can be seen in Afghanistan in the past couple of days, we will do it with the aid of the people of the region, and in the end, they will be much better off. To the degree that it is very messy now, that will be the result of how badly we (the West, that is, particularly Britain) botched it the first time during decolonialisation. It’s time to go back and take a “do over,” and do it right this time.

Look, I’m eternally grateful that George Bush won instead of Al Gore, though I didn’t vote for him (of course, I didn’t vote for Gore either…). And I’ve always thought that picking on his elocution by the likes of Jay Leno and Saturday Night Live was silly, counterproductive, and not all that funny (the media apparently misunderestimated his strategery). And even I, as loquacious as I am, occasionally make a verbal misstep.

But can someone, anyone (Mary? Karl? Karen? Condi? Laura?) please teach him that it’s pronounced “noo-klee-ur” and not “noo-ku-lar,” and make him practice for a few minutes a day until he can get it consistently right, particularly when standing next to the President of Russia? It’s driving me right up the wall.

[Update]

A reader correctly points out that “Jimmy Carter couldn’t pronounce it either, and he was a nuclear engineer.”

This is true–I remember that. But maybe he wasn’t–maybe he was a nucular engineer. Is it some kind of southern thang?

Truly, as I said, I’m ecstatic that Bush is President instead of Gore or Clinton, and this is not a slam at his intelligence (he at least graduated from graduate school). I just wish that he could get this one right, since it’s a very common word lately.

Look, I’m eternally grateful that George Bush won instead of Al Gore, though I didn’t vote for him (of course, I didn’t vote for Gore either…). And I’ve always thought that picking on his elocution by the likes of Jay Leno and Saturday Night Live was silly, counterproductive, and not all that funny (the media apparently misunderestimated his strategery). And even I, as loquacious as I am, occasionally make a verbal misstep.

But can someone, anyone (Mary? Karl? Karen? Condi? Laura?) please teach him that it’s pronounced “noo-klee-ur” and not “noo-ku-lar,” and make him practice for a few minutes a day until he can get it consistently right, particularly when standing next to the President of Russia? It’s driving me right up the wall.

[Update]

A reader correctly points out that “Jimmy Carter couldn’t pronounce it either, and he was a nuclear engineer.”

This is true–I remember that. But maybe he wasn’t–maybe he was a nucular engineer. Is it some kind of southern thang?

Truly, as I said, I’m ecstatic that Bush is President instead of Gore or Clinton, and this is not a slam at his intelligence (he at least graduated from graduate school). I just wish that he could get this one right, since it’s a very common word lately.

Look, I’m eternally grateful that George Bush won instead of Al Gore, though I didn’t vote for him (of course, I didn’t vote for Gore either…). And I’ve always thought that picking on his elocution by the likes of Jay Leno and Saturday Night Live was silly, counterproductive, and not all that funny (the media apparently misunderestimated his strategery). And even I, as loquacious as I am, occasionally make a verbal misstep.

But can someone, anyone (Mary? Karl? Karen? Condi? Laura?) please teach him that it’s pronounced “noo-klee-ur” and not “noo-ku-lar,” and make him practice for a few minutes a day until he can get it consistently right, particularly when standing next to the President of Russia? It’s driving me right up the wall.

[Update]

A reader correctly points out that “Jimmy Carter couldn’t pronounce it either, and he was a nuclear engineer.”

This is true–I remember that. But maybe he wasn’t–maybe he was a nucular engineer. Is it some kind of southern thang?

Truly, as I said, I’m ecstatic that Bush is President instead of Gore or Clinton, and this is not a slam at his intelligence (he at least graduated from graduate school). I just wish that he could get this one right, since it’s a very common word lately.

Nothing really new here, but AP has picked up the XCOR story, and they have it generally right, which is always a welcome surprise when it comes to stories about space or science (or almost anything else, come to think of it). I think I actually talked to this reporter for a couple minutes myself after the flight.

I mentioned this briefly last night, but as a follow up, XCOR’s EZ-Rocket has been named one of Time magazine’s Inventions of the Year. I’m going up to Mojave this morning to see the rollout (weather permitting–the first Alaskan rainstorm of the season is heading toward southern California this afternoon), and I’ll provide a report (including a discussion of why this company, and others like it, are important to our future in space) when I get back.

While most the media is half reporting, half ignoring (apparently the network morning shows have barely mentioned it) the story that George Bush actually won the Florida vote and the election (for the…what, fifth, sixth, seventh time?), and that Gore has yet to win a single recount, John Lott and Jim Glassman have teased out some interesting revelations from the statistical data that has gotten totally lost in all the mendacious noise and spin about “black disenfranchisement” in Florida. It turns out that the most likely voters to have spoiled ballots were black Republicans in counties with Democrat voting commissioners. Apparently, to whatever degree there was any hanky panky to keep blacks from voting, it was mostly directed at that roughly one in twenty misguided souls of African descent who had the temerity to not be Democrats. Now one in twenty doesn’t sound like much, but it comes to over twenty thousand, and as Lott and Glassman point out, it’s about twenty times the winning margin…

(Rare) kudos to the LA Times for publishing this.