Amidst all of the nonsense coming out of the media about “root causes,” and “Israeli war crimes,” it’s always good, as a reminder to understand the real issues at stake, to read Bibi.
Going To The Birds
There are some places where seeing dinosaur descendants would be an everyday occurrence–your back yard, Sesame Street (which has one of the Big variety), the aviary at the San Diego Zoo–but my living room is not one of them. Thus it was notable this evening that I suffered an invasion by not zero, not one, but two animals of the feathered variety in Casa Transterrestrial.
The disconsertion was amplified by the fact that it occurred during dinner, which was occurring in the living room, during a Simpsons rerun, Patricia being up in Reno and thus unable to protect me from the beaky predators as I innocently munched my chicken nachos (were they, Hitchcock-like, lying in wait for me, as I ate their distant cousin?).
I was first alerted to the avian intruders by Jessica. Jessica is the younger cat, who has misleadingly gangly legs, and black fur with a white undercoat, and who seems much too uncoordinated to deal with flying prey.
The elder cat, Stella, is a premiere ratter, having dispatched all the rodents who temporarily took up abode in the garage after discovering my stash of malt and corn sugar, set aside as brewery inputs after I discovered that beer was unacceptably carbohydratic for my newly-discovered relatively paleolithic protein-rich diet. But I’ve never seen her catch a bird, and I suspect that, at age thirteen, her hunting days may be behind her.
Anyway, Jessica was making that peculiar moaning sound, familiar to cat owners, of a cat in pure, unadulterated hunting mode. She was looking up toward the cathedral, wood-beam ceiling at a fluttering apparition in the beams. I saw the motion myself, and went to turn on the track lights to view it better.
It was a hummingbird, frantically beating itself against the ceiling between the beams, attempting to find a way to freedom. Its wings were beating at approximately thirty-four thousand flutters per second. It was clear that it was going to run out of energy in a matter of short minutes at its current rate.
Don’t ask me how it got in–I don’t know now, and I never will.
The ceiling is high on that end of the room. The front door was just below, however, so I opened it. It was late, but the sun wasn’t down, so I hoped that the light coming in would draw it to the Great Outdoors.
Fortunately, after a few minutes, it did indeed come down toward the door. But it didn’t go out. It beat itself against the narrow wall between the open front door and the entrance to the kitchen, in which it perhaps had fantasies of endless supplies of sugar water with which to power its frantic wings.
I gently brushed it toward the open door with my hand and, panicked, it found the opening, exited, and quickly increased altitude. Unlike the living room, it was ceiling unlimited.
Relieved, I sat down to finish my chicken nacho consumption.
Then Jessica started crying and pawing at the fireplace. Now what?
I heard another fluttering of wings in the hearth.
Great. Another bird had flown down the chimney, and was beating itself up in the flue, or in the logs on the grate. The cat was going nuts trying to get to it, and I couldn’t see any way to persuade it to go back up the chimney, or to head outside.
As I sat there, trying to figure out what to do, Jessica finally managed to frighten it into flying out of the fireplace, and toward the glass patio doors in the living room. It was hiding and fluttering in the vertical blinds.
I opened up the door all the way, and got the cat away from it.
Like the hummingbird, I gently brushed it toward the door opening. It found the exit, and fluttered up and away.
Jessica looked up at me, disappointed. She whined a little, and then went outside.
I finished dinner.
New Space Blogger In Town
Well, I don’t know how new it is, but I just noticed that Mark Whittington has a blog. I guess he’s been too modest to tell me about it.
He’s just published a space-related novel–an alternate history of the program since Apollo. Because I haven’t read it, I can’t recommend it (or disrecommend it), other than to say that it’s an interesting premise. But those who do come here for the space stuff might want to check it out.
He has a post today that describes the book, and is closely related to my Fox News column.
Deconstructing The Jenin Lies
Over at Winds of Change, Joe Katzman dissects the Palestinian propaganda over Jenin quite thoroughly.
As more and more facts come out, it looks pretty much exactly like one would expect if one sent troops in to take out terrorists in booby-trapped buildings. The other thing that is clear is how devastating the defeat was for the terrorists.
They didn’t anticipate the Israeli tactics–they were hoping for much higher Israeli casualties from the booby traps and kiddie bombers. Or alternatively, much higher Palestinian casualties from overwhelming Israeli firepower, which they could then use for propaganda.
As it was, they lost many soldiers, all of their munitions, and the propaganda value is proving limited as the facts come out, and no one but the loons are still calling it a massacre of civilians.
Taking It To The Enemy
Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. It occurred on April 18, 1942. It was our first response to Pearl Harbor, a little over four months after the attack.
Of the many irritating things about the movie Pearl Harbor (I finally saw it on pay-per-view a couple weeks ago), and there were many, the worst was casting Alec Baldwin as Doolittle. Though at least, by playing a hero, it did require him to actually act.
Fox News Column Up
My Fox News column is up. The summary on the headline page is a little misleading–it says that “Landing on Mars should not be the priority of the United States’ space program.”
One can infer that from the piece (which is essentially the same as the one a few posts down), but it wasn’t the main point. My main points are that we aren’t going to, and shouldn’t, repeat Apollo, and that the Kennedy-as-space-visionary myth is not only something that’s not going to be repeated, but never really happened the first time.
New Terrorism?
An aircraft has hit the Pirelli Tire building in Milan. It’s been characterized as a terrorist attack. Apparently it was a Piper with explosives on board. Unless they’re simply mistaking the fuel tank exploding for a deliberate one.
That’s too bad. Italy was already on our side. I didn’t want this to occur anywhere, but it if it had happened in Paris or Brussels, it might have had a more salutory effect on some of the idiotic attitudes there.
Fox is now saying that there is a report that the pilot sent an SOS, so it’s still a confused situation.
[Update at 9:35AM PDT]
Now they’re saying that it’s looking less like terrorism, because of the multiple SOS signals. It’s still bizarre though, that it would accidentally hit the tallest building in Milan, and probably the closest thing to a symbol of capitalism they have there. Of course, the timing is not optimal to maximize casualties (early evening in Italy, when many have presumably gone home). It may indeed be just a weird accident.
Two Hundred Megawatts–Hold The Sox, Please
Instantman points out an article in the Strib today about a potential breakthrough in clean-burning coal.
If it’s true, expect many of the environmentalist groups to throw rocks at it–this is their worst nightmare. After all, who cares if we reduce sulfur dioxide (SOX) and nitrous oxides (NOX)? It still emits that horrible, deadly CO2 that’s going to cook us all.
And of course, it will remove one of the barriers to their worst enemy of all–economic growth and capitalism.
Our Friends The United Nations
I’ve never been that big a fan of the UN (well, at least not since I was little kid, and propagandized into taking a little milk carton around at Halloween to collect pennies for UNICEF), but I’ve also never been one of the John-Birch, anti-trilateralist conspiracy whackos, either. I generally just considered it irrelevant.
But after reading the bill of particulars laid out by Michael Rubin in today’s Journal, I think that it is indeed time to get out, send them packing to Brussels or, better yet, Lagos or Jenin, and reallocate the real estate on the East River to something useful.
It is a classic, textbook case of one of the fundamental flaws of democracy.
Whither Mars?
In a comment on my post about the “Face on Mars,” Foxnews reader “DocZen” asks:
When are we actually *going* to Mars?
Is the current lull in space exploration just that, or did we just look at Apollo as a big waste of time/money?
The way I see it, technology has been riding the advances we made during those years, and has really progressed little in my eyes…
We should look at going to Mars not as a proposition in and of itself, but as a way to experiment with new technologies, and get them into our living rooms (and pockets!)
What is it with current NASA administration, anyway? They’re so afraid to make space travel ‘cool’ that it almost hurts. Open up space travel to tourists. Bring back the days when we looked up to our astronauts, as now they are nameless, faceless scientists.
The WWII generation went to the moon, no offense, but the baby boomers spent too much time smoking pot and protesting…what is *MY* generation going to do with its time on earth?
In other words: “where the hell is my flying car?” :]
I’m printing the comment, because I think his questions and feelings are shared by many people.
Right out of the box, I’ll say that I don’t pretend to have an answer to the question of when we will send people to Mars. Predictions are always hazardous, particularly about the future. Of course, almost no one would have predicted in July, 1959 that men would be walking on the moon a decade later. I also have to confess to not seeing this as an urgent thing, at least until we get our other space affairs in order.
Space enthusiasts tend to see the Apollo program as the Golden Age, the paradigm of how a space program Should Be, and how it Could Be if only we got another President with the vision of JFK.
This is a myth. Recently-discovered documents indicate that Kennedy wasn’t particularly interested in space–as I described a couple of weeks ago, he only pursued Apollo as a response to the embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Gagarin flight.
Now, he tells Webb that beating the Russians to the moon “is the top priority of the agency and … except for defense, the top priority of the United States government. …. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space.”
If by some political miracle (and that’s truly what it would take) we were to initiate a Mars program today, I believe that it would put us even further off track than Apollo did. We weren’t really ready to go to the Moon in 1961, and it would be premature to set off to Mars in 2002.
I don’t mean this in the sense of technical feasibility–clearly we were capable of sending men to the Moon in the sixties, and just as clearly we could send men (and women) to Mars today (or at least initiate an ultimately-successful program to do so) if we chose to.
What I mean is that by jumping to a grand goal before the technology has matured, we would bypass some critical steps in making it practical and affordable. We first stepped on the Moon in 1969. We last did so only three years later, almost thirty years ago. We haven’t been back because in our hurry, we didn’t lay the groundwork for a politically or economically-sustainable program.
In fact, NASA Administrator James Webb was very concerned about this at the time, but couldn’t get Kennedy to accept it as important.
On the tape, Webb tells Kennedy that some of the nation’s top space scientists doubt whether it is possible to send humans on a lunar voyage. “There are real unknowns about whether man can live under the weightless environment,” he says. Committing to a manned lunar landing, Webb tells the president, could leave the country vulnerable to failure. Instead, Webb insists, landing on the moon should be only part of a broad effort by NASA to understand the space environment and its effects on human beings.
Webb’s tone in confronting the nation’s chief executive is fearless. Historian John Logsdon of George Washington University says Webb “must have felt very strongly about this,” adding that there had been a running feud at NASA Headquarters about how much importance Apollo should have.
But Kennedy stands firm, telling Webb that the moon landing is NASA’s top priority. ” This is, whether we like it or not, a race?. Everything we do [in space] ought to be tied into getting to the moon ahead of the Russians.”
I think that, considering these new facts, and our stasis for the past three decades, relative to what was envisioned and possible, it’s time to lay to rest John F. Kennedy as the template for the ideal president to lead us into space.
And in fact, it’s a mistake to expect any President to both have that kind of vision, and the political support to implement it. It might happen, but it’s extremely unlikely (since it never really even happened the first time).
But if I can’t say when we’ll go to Mars, I can describe some of the conditions that will have to be in place before such a thing is likely to occur. And that’s what I’ll do in a post in the near future.