My new Fox News column is up. It’s mostly recycled from here, but I do have some new stuff in the “Letters” section on my give and take with the creationists that I inadvertently brought out of the woodwork last week.

My new Fox News column is up. It’s mostly recycled from here, but I do have some new stuff in the “Letters” section on my give and take with the creationists that I inadvertently brought out of the woodwork last week.

Will Warren has an ode to our current favorite media punching bag.

She’s just letting this Palestinian representative sit there and lie to her, and not challenging him. He says that it’s “nonsense” that they teach children to martyr themselves in the schools. He says that “no one” would support their childrens’ suicides.

All she would have had to do was to have some tape cued up of these lunatic Palestinian mothers bragging about how they wanted to send their sons off to die. Or some graphics of some texts from the madrassas. Or some tape of the Arafat praising the martyrs in Arabic (it would be effective with English subtitles, and he would have looked like a real ass trying to say that that wasn’t what Arafat was saying).

But no, she didn’t bother to prepare for this interview. I preferred the rotation that Fox had before Greta came aboard. It was inconsistent, but it wasn’t consistently incompetent.

She’s just letting this Palestinian representative sit there and lie to her, and not challenging him. He says that it’s “nonsense” that they teach children to martyr themselves in the schools. He says that “no one” would support their childrens’ suicides.

All she would have had to do was to have some tape cued up of these lunatic Palestinian mothers bragging about how they wanted to send their sons off to die. Or some graphics of some texts from the madrassas. Or some tape of the Arafat praising the martyrs in Arabic (it would be effective with English subtitles, and he would have looked like a real ass trying to say that that wasn’t what Arafat was saying).

But no, she didn’t bother to prepare for this interview. I preferred the rotation that Fox had before Greta came aboard. It was inconsistent, but it wasn’t consistently incompetent.

She’s just letting this Palestinian representative sit there and lie to her, and not challenging him. He says that it’s “nonsense” that they teach children to martyr themselves in the schools. He says that “no one” would support their childrens’ suicides.

All she would have had to do was to have some tape cued up of these lunatic Palestinian mothers bragging about how they wanted to send their sons off to die. Or some graphics of some texts from the madrassas. Or some tape of the Arafat praising the martyrs in Arabic (it would be effective with English subtitles, and he would have looked like a real ass trying to say that that wasn’t what Arafat was saying).

But no, she didn’t bother to prepare for this interview. I preferred the rotation that Fox had before Greta came aboard. It was inconsistent, but it wasn’t consistently incompetent.

Derek Lowe, over at the Lagniappe blog, has a nice little summary of the current state of medical science.

In the long run, I fully expect gene therapy and antisense to fix what can be fixed at the genomic level. Downstream, I think we’ll eventually get control of protein expression, which should take care of another huge swath of trouble. Small- molecule folks like me (or the next generation after me) will take care of the rest. And as we go after diseases, we’ll also be figuring out how to deal with the normal damage of aging. I don’t know how long the human life span can be extended, but I’m certain that we don’t have to live it in poor health. We may not know the exact mechanism of Alzheimer’s, for example, but we know that it’s the result of something going wrong, something that can be fixed. Damn it, show me something that can’t be fixed!

Me, too. People who believe that aging is inevitable, and that there’s some physical law that prevents us from preventing it, are living in some non-materialist otherworld. Our bodies have been designed to age by nature. We can redesign them, as long as we don’t deify “nature.”

The same column that told us the real story about Norm Mineta says that the President’s approval rating on the Mideast is not as high as his general approval:

Fifty-six percent thought President Bush is doing a good or excellent job on the Mideast, with 23 percent rating his performance only fair and 16 percent finding it poor.

I often find polls infuriating, because they’re so vague as to allow whatever interpretation the reporter wants to put on them. We don’t know why people are less pleased with the President’s performance here, but you can bet that most will report it as the reporters view it–frustration that he’s not “doing more” and getting “more engaged” like their hero President Clinton.

In fact, I’m unhappy with Bush on this issue, too, but not because he’s not moving the “peace process” forward–it’s because he’s coddling that terrorist Arafat. But there’s no way to tell from this poll which factor, or what proportion of both, is resulting in the number.

Amidst all of my complaining about Norm Mineta with regard to airline security, I consoled myself with the fact that at least he did one thing right since September 11, when he grounded all flights that day.

Now it turns out, he didn’t even do that. His number two did. Time for him to go.

Ken Layne’s Fox News column yesterday had a novel proposal for resolving the conflict over Palestine–move the Jews to Baja California. It’s actually not as wacky as it sounds–the Zionist movement considered many locations before settling on present-day Israel, including Uganda, Libya, Iraq, Angola, Canada, Australia, Madagascar, Siberia, and even the southwest United States. In fact, a settlement of several thousand was established in Texas just before the first World War.

But you know me. When you’re a jackhammer, everything looks like concrete, and when you’re a space geek, every terrestrial problem has an extraterrestrial solution. So I’d like to reprise a proposal that I made on this very weblog back in October–let’s establish a Jewish state on the Moon.

They’ve got to be getting tired of the flying shrapnel and body parts to the point that anywhere else would look good. It’s territory that no one else is claiming (though the 1967 Outer Space Treaty actually precludes national sovereignty claims off planet, but the Israelis couldn’t get anyone who mattered any more upset with them by breaking it).

And judging by their current rate of technological progress (as demonstrated by their haphazard success in killing people with crude suicide/homicide bombs, a simple-minded technology if ever there was one), it will be many decades or centuries before the Palestinians develop space travel themselves to follow them out there.

If we help them with transportation, it will create the mass market that we need to drive down space transport costs, and develop the technology that we need to conquer the space frontier. Sounds like a win-win to me.