Monthly Archives: March 2004

War Commentary

Man Bites Dog

The Vatican has actually condemned Palestinian terror tactics.

The Vatican, often critical of Israel, harshly condemned Palestinian terrorists for trying to use a teenager as a suicide bomber.

I guess it would have been all right if it was an adult murdering those Jews (and other “Palestinians”).

Space

The Wrong Author

Steven Weinberg has a 5500-word essay in the New York Review of books on the president’s space initiative. It repeats the same tired nonsense and myths, about how space is for science, that there’s no reason for people to go, that it will cost a trillion dollars.

The President gave no cost estimates, but John McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, has cited reports that the new initiative would cost between $170 billion and $600 billion. According to NASA briefing documents, the figure of $170 billion is intended to take NASA only up to 2020, and does not include the cost of the Mars mission itself. After the former President Bush announced a similar initiative in 1989, NASA estimated that the cost of sending astronauts to the moon and Mars would be either $471 billion or $541 billion in 1991 dollars, depending on the method of calculation. This is roughly $900 billion in today’s dollars. Whatever cost may be estimated by NASA for the new initiative, we can expect cost overruns like those that have often accompanied big NASA programs. (In 1984 NASA estimated that it would cost $8 billion to put the International Space Station in place, not counting the cost of using it. I have seen figures for its cost so far ranging from $25 billion to $60 billion, and the station is far from finished.) Let’s not haggle over a hundred billion dollars more or less

War Commentary

Making It Worse

In Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (a movie that’s about to be rereleased to theatres to capitalize on the success of Mel Gibson’s “Passion”), there’s a hilarious scene in which a man is about to be stoned to death for blasphemy.

Really.

MATTHIAS: Look. I don’t think it ought to be blasphemy, just saying ‘Jehovah’.

CROWD: Oooh! He said it again! Oooh!…

OFFICIAL: You’re only making it worse for yourself!

MATTHIAS: Making it worse?! How could it be worse?! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!

Allison Kaplan Sommer says that, after years of intifada, this is the point that the Israeli public has reached, and why there’s little domestic opposition to Sharon’s plan to build the wall and kill the terrorist leadership.

With nothing left to lose, let’s try to do what we can to protect ourselves. That’s the sentiment of the man on the street.

Clearly, the Israeli public seems to have all but given up on figuring out how to make the right moves in order to nudge the Palestinians towards wanting a peaceful two-state solution. They’ve given up. That’s why there’s generally support for Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan — otherwise known as the “We’re So Disgusted with the Palestinians, We’re Getting the Hell Away From Them and Building a Big Wall” plan. And if they try to wage war from the other side of the wall, they’ll get the same treatment as Yassin.

We’re not running scared. We’re just sick and tired of this.

Stephen den Beste (from whom I got the link to Allison’s post) has further thoughts.

Political Commentary

Misleading Polls

I always get irritated when I see opinion polls, particularly on elections. One of the most misleading questions, in my opinion, is the one on “right track, wrong track” or “presidential approval.” There is always a presumption, that I don’t think is necessarily valid, that this translates automatically into prospects for the reelection of the incumbent. This is probably because the people who do the polls tend to think that voters are really as binary as the myth of the two-party system would indicate.

Perhaps I’m atypical, but you would not be able to figure out how I was going to vote on the basis of my answers to those questions.

I think that the country is on the wrong track, and has been so for decades. I disapprove of the president’s performance in many areas. If you asked me those questions, I’d answer, “wrong track” and “disapprove.”

Does that mean that I’m going to vote for John Kerry in November? Many would infer that, but there’s no logical reason to do so. Almost all of the issues on which I think that we’re on the “wrong track,” and of which I disapprove of the administration policy, would be vastly worse in a Democrat administration.

The polls don’t seem to take into account the fact that many (or at least some) voters will be holding their nose in the booth and voting for the lesser of two evils, as the result of the evil of two lessers, which renders those poll questions, if not meaningless, extremely misleading.

Political Commentary

But They Have Such Spiffy Uniforms

Many airports want to return to private security screening.

To gauge how well federal screeners were doing, Congress ordered five commercial airports to use privately employed screeners who are hired, trained, paid and tested to TSA standards. Those airports are in San Francisco; Rochester, N.Y.; Tupelo, Miss.; Jackson, Wyo.; and Kansas City, Mo. A report comparing the performance of both kinds of screeners is due next month.

John Martin, airport director at San Francisco International Airport, said screeners are hired and trained more quickly there than at airports with government screeners.

“Bottom line: we don’t have long lines at San Francisco,” he said.

I’ll look forward to seeing the report.