There’s a new auction site on the Internet. For all those usually hard-to-get items, it’s a one-stop shop of government favors.

Check out Sacramento-based E-Gray where everything has a price.

[Thanks to Lloyd Albano]

Bill says he’s “full of regret” that he didn’t get bin Laden. No doubt, as he continues to watch the vestiges of his “legacy” spin down the old crapper.

“I thought that my virtual obsession with him was well placed, and I was full of regret that I didn’t get him,” he said.

I can’t stand to watch Larry King, but I’d be willing to bet that this statement was not challenged in any way by the sycophantic softballmeister.

“Virtual obsession”?

Like when he told the Sudanese to ship him to Saudi Arabia instead of taking custody of him? Like when he sent a few cruise missiles into empty Afghan terrorist camps? Maybe such ineffective and inattentive actions are why he calls it a “virtual” obsession. It’s certainly not the mark of a real one.

We know what his real obsessions are, and they have nothing to do with either terrorism specifically, or national security in general. And amidst all the big-money speeches, and mindless fawning females, he no doubt continues to indulge them.

Bill says he’s “full of regret” that he didn’t get bin Laden. No doubt, as he continues to watch the vestiges of his “legacy” spin down the old crapper.

“I thought that my virtual obsession with him was well placed, and I was full of regret that I didn’t get him,” he said.

I can’t stand to watch Larry King, but I’d be willing to bet that this statement was not challenged in any way by the sycophantic softballmeister.

“Virtual obsession”?

Like when he told the Sudanese to ship him to Saudi Arabia instead of taking custody of him? Like when he sent a few cruise missiles into empty Afghan terrorist camps? Maybe such ineffective and inattentive actions are why he calls it a “virtual” obsession. It’s certainly not the mark of a real one.

We know what his real obsessions are, and they have nothing to do with either terrorism specifically, or national security in general. And amidst all the big-money speeches, and mindless fawning females, he no doubt continues to indulge them.

Bill says he’s “full of regret” that he didn’t get bin Laden. No doubt, as he continues to watch the vestiges of his “legacy” spin down the old crapper.

“I thought that my virtual obsession with him was well placed, and I was full of regret that I didn’t get him,” he said.

I can’t stand to watch Larry King, but I’d be willing to bet that this statement was not challenged in any way by the sycophantic softballmeister.

“Virtual obsession”?

Like when he told the Sudanese to ship him to Saudi Arabia instead of taking custody of him? Like when he sent a few cruise missiles into empty Afghan terrorist camps? Maybe such ineffective and inattentive actions are why he calls it a “virtual” obsession. It’s certainly not the mark of a real one.

We know what his real obsessions are, and they have nothing to do with either terrorism specifically, or national security in general. And amidst all the big-money speeches, and mindless fawning females, he no doubt continues to indulge them.

Check out the new spacey-themed pic at The Bleat this week.

It’s not a new story, but a new take on an old one. USA Today says that at least a couple hundred people made the horrific choice of jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center, rather than dying by suffocation or burning.

What struck me in the story, however, was this sentence:

Many south tower survivors say the sight of people jumping created an urgency that caused them to leave immediately and ignore announcements that it was safe to return to their desks. About 1,400 people evacuated the upper floors before the second jet hit.

While it wasn’t their intent, the jumpers, in choosing to jump, may have saved many hundreds more in the South Tower.

An Iraqi man was found on the streets of Zurich, with his mouth sewn shut, reportedly by his own hand.

I, too, am speechless.

Jim Bennett says that it’s not always as obvious at the time what should be done, as it is later to the Monday-morning quarterbacks. He compares the Titanic to the World Trade Center. And to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938.

One example he points out is relevant to space (you knew I was going to talk about how this is relevant to space, didn’t you?)

Today we ask, “How could Titanic not have enough lifeboats for everybody?” But at the time, it was assumed that lifeboats were only usable in a minority of scenarios, and in most of those scenarios the boats would be used to evacuate passengers from a slowly-sinking ship to another ship, making multiple trips. The general assumption was that it was more productive to concentrate on making the ship as robust as possible. Similarly today we do not design airliners with military-style ejection pods, like those used on bombers, but rather concentrate on making the aircraft as robust as possible.

And similarly, we didn’t design the Shuttle for ejection–the design goal was to make such an eventuality unnecessary, because it was unaffordable to put in that capability. It would have added a lot of extra weight to the vehicle, sacrificing payload, and it would have had a dramatic impact on functionality of the system as planned.

The problem with that philosophy was that they didn’t just save money on the crew-escape system–they also scrimped on the reliability, by using multi-segment solids, instead of liquid boosters, and in not providing adequate testing of the system, because it was too expensive to fly, as designed.

But the lesson is not that manned space transports must have ejection seats–it’s that we need to truly design them to not require them, just as we do airliners.

The recent post on the electoral college raised anew an issue that I often find frustrating in debating policy, particularly when it comes to court decisions, and particularly Supreme Court decisions.

I often find that people have difficulty making a distinction between their position, and the metadiscussion of how they arrive at it. These are two separate discussions, but they continually get conflated in common discourse. That post was not about the merits of the electoral college per se, but rather about the merits of a couple of particular arguments that were made against it.

It is quite possible to believe that a position is correct, while a particular argument for it is weak, or fallacious. In fact, it’s important to be able to articulate and make a good argument (or at least the best one possible) for either side of a case–this is commonly taught (or so I am told) in law school.

While I do happen to think that the current electoral college system is satisfactory (though perhaps increasing the resolution on it so that electors are elected by congressional district, rather than at a state level, might improve it somewhat), I was disagreeing in that post with the quality of the arguments presented, not the position itself.

It is quite possible to agree with (or at least be in favor of) the outcome of, for example, a decision of the Supreme Court, while disagreeing with the reasoning by which it was reached. The case that jumps most immediately to mind here is Roe v. Wade, in which they ruled abortion a right by flawed reasoning and a reading into the Constitution of rights that many believe are not there. Even Justice Ginsberg, I believe, has stated that while she believes herself in a woman’s right to choose to abort her child, she’s troubled by that particular decision on Constitutional grounds.

There are many decisions of the Supreme Court that I view as “wrong” in the sense that they result in a society in which it’s less desirable for me to live, but I agree with them in the sense that they are indeed in concert with the Constitution, which is the criterion on which they’re supposed to be basing their decisions. I don’t understand why more people aren’t capable of making this distinction.

And it’s not just a complaint about topics and modes of discussion on a blog–it has real-world political consequences.

By my view, when the Supremes make a decision that I dislike, but is constitutionally correct, the appropriate response is not to be angry at them, and to start an impeachment drive, or to lobby my senators to put someone on the Court who will make decisions more compatible with my desires (i.e., to rig the process to give me the result I want), but rather, to amend the document whence the decision came.

Unfortunately, it’s easier to play politics and bork judges than it is to amend the founding document, so that’s what politicians do, and because the public rarely makes the distinction, they get away with it.

Jim Bennett has a follow-up email that points out that more than four out of five Brits would like to see the death penalty restored. While the numbers aren’t as high, I’ve seen polls in the other EU countries that indicate that this is a majority opinion there as well.

I assume that the UK and those other places are all examples of those “world’s major democracies” to which the previous post was referring, but as Jim points out, we seem to do a much better job of actually implementing the will of the people over here.