Transterrestrial Musings

November 30, 2005
The Best Way to Be Controversial...

...is to call for an end to controversial debate. I got more calls and letters on this article than I got in a year of previous writing. The responses were polarized. The most controversial item was my list of companies that could succeed if we stop space industry infighting. The list was a mistake--no list can be completely inclusive so better to describe broad categories. I did not intend to exclude companies. Many many companies can prosper in a boom. Not all will be around 25 years from now. IBM is not even in the PC business any more.

Setting aside the list, the correspondence was bi-modal. Half said it's about time that someone said this. Some of these people had Washington return addresses. The other half said it is brutally repressive to cage the intellectual debate, and counterproductive.

I think there must be some kind of inverse square law that says if you have a political party that represents 50% of the people, it has one opinion, but a splinter interest group that represents 1% of the people has 2500 opinions.

There certainly can be a democratic process to arrive periodically at consensus. I favor a knockout auction where the proponents of a position pay those that disagree with it if they win.

Those who agreed with my article probably would think that just about any civility and unity in the space industry would be better than division and infighting regardless of the message disseminated.

Those who disagreed with my article challenged that there was any way to arrive at a consensus without free and open debate that wouldn't fatally taint the ultimate message.

I guess I will have to go on being controversial and dividing people.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 09:28 AM

Uncommon Sense From The TSA

They may have decided to let us keep our nail clippers.

Officials want screeners to focus more on finding things that can explode rather than things that are sharp.

Gosh, what a concept.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:07 AM

If We Lose The War

...nonsense like this will be one of the reasons:

Is this what the U.S. State Department thinks America is really like? How many men, outside a tiny subset in major cities, are the primping, feminized "metrosexuals" the article lauds? Not many. You cannot enhance understanding between one people and another by presenting a false version of one side.
But more importantly, is this the way to "build bridges" between the Arab world and ourselves? Does the State Department believe that Arab males — some of whom do not permit their wives and daughters to go out in public without a male family member as escort, others of whom think nothing of killing a daughter who dishonors the family by fraternizing with a boy — are going to be impressed with a vision of America in which males are feminized "exfoliated," smooth-skinned eunuchs?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 AM

Time To Upgrade

The new version of Firefox is out.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:31 AM

If WW II Had Been...

...an on-line gaming chat room:

Stalin: church help me
Churchill: like u helped me before? sure ill just sit here
Stalin: dont be an arss
Churchill: dont be a commie. oops too late
Eisenhower: LOL
benny-tow: hahahh oh sh1t help
Hitler: o man ur focked
paTTon: oh what now biotch
Roosevelt: whos the cripple now lol
*benny-tow has been eliminated.*
benny-tow: lame
Roosevelt: gj patton
paTTon: thnx
Hitler[AoE]: WTF eisenhower hax hes killing all my sh1t
Hitler[AoE]: quit u hacker so u dont ruin my record
Eisenhower: Nuts!
benny~tow: wtf that mean?
Eisenhower: meant to say nutsack lol finger slipped
paTTon: coming to get u hitler u paper hanging hun ****socker
Stalin: rofl

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:23 AM

Darwin Award Contestant

Actually, it doesn't say whether or not he had descendants, but one would guess not.

It's hard to believe that alcohol wasn't involved. The story doesn't say whether he won. One more reason to be embarrassed to be a Floridian.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:12 AM

November 29, 2005
Lincoln Lied, People Died

What if Michael Moore (and Ken Burns) had been living in the 1860s, with modern video technology...?

[via Spleenville]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:17 PM

A Wasted Blog Post

From Andrea Harris, via my comments section:

...neither Rand nor Mark Stein said that Hollywood is losing money because they no longer make "morality tales." Why don't you try reading the article? Steyn said that the reason Hollywood is losing money is because 1) the cramped, uncomfortable theaters with bad, blurry pictures run by inept crews, 2) the dull, bland, safe rehashing of the same three ideas (wacky girl and guy fall into comic hate-love, hilarity ensues, also car chases; brooding freethinking manchild who is still in love with his divorced Only Wife is Abused By the System -- which is represented by short-haired white men in suits, aka Republicans; or occasionally, blond neo-Nazi terrorists with fake Cherman accents -- and Loses Everything He Has But His Dignity, with car chases and explosions; and brooding, mature woman-goddess is Hurt By Men, but is redeemed by her Feisty, Bitchy, Neurotic, Yet Wise Beyond Their Prescriptions female friends -- no car chases and the only explosions are screaming cat fights that dissolve into hugs 'n' tears) 3) the stifling political correctness that covers the industry like a blanket of mold and which has done something formerly thought impossible: made the Catholic League for Decency (or whatever they were called), the Hays Commission, and the dreaded Joe McCarthy and HUAC look like a bunch of fun party people.
He noted that Harry Potter was a phenomenon, but one unconnected to the overall problem of the no-fun suck that Hollywood's output has become. He did imply that people go see the Potter movies because they seem to actually accept that there is good and evil in the world, not just "accepting" and "hurtful." They also aren't overly concerned with political correctness, though Rowling is careful to have Indian and black students in the wizard school, and one of Goblet of Fire's subplots is (at least in the book, I haven't seen the movie) about bigotry against the "different," in this case, giants -- but at least no one gets up and stops the action dead to make a speech, or worse. If the current minds behind today's thrillers with the fake "nazis are the only acceptible villains" terrorists in them had been in charge of the Potter films Harry would have been cast as a black lesbian paraplegic and there would have been no magic to avoid insulting Wiccans.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:26 PM

Mother Of The Year

Not.

A mother has been charged with trying to poison her adult daughter and her daughter's family after allegedly pouring bleach into their macaroni and cheese on Saturday night.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:09 AM

Brave People

Debunking Mao, in Berkeley:

The husband-and-wife team of Chang and Halliday supported their archival research with interviews with 150 former Mao lieutenants, concluding that Mao was not only bloodier than Hitler or Stalin but worse in his destruction of culture.

The unrepentent commies and Maoists who (sadly) still infest the place are, needless to say, upset.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:32 AM

A Fungus Amongus

Anybody know what this thing is? I saw it in the back yard while fertilizing the ixora.

It's hollow, and those are holes in it, like a whiffle ball. I thought that it was some kind of toy at first.

[Update]

At Michael Mealing's suggestion in comments, I did a search on "stinkhorn," and it does indeed resemble this. There wasn't any noticeable stink to it, though (I got right down on it to smell it). Then again, I don't have the most sensitive schnoz in the world.

[Another update]

Yes, it does look exactly like a clathrus crispus. It makes geographical sense, too, since the climate on the Virgin Islands is not dissimilar to that of south Florida. And this site says that it's common in the Caribbean and Florida.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:13 AM

Another Microsoft Problem

This is pretty funny:

Windows Cluster Server?
Aw, it's not for you. It's more of a Shelbyville idea.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:10 AM

November 28, 2005
Happy Eightieth Birthday

To the Grand Ol' Opry.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:07 PM

Why Hollywood Continues To Lose Money

Mark Steyn explains that it's political correctness:

...I stopped to buy the third boxed set in the ''Looney Tunes Golden Collection.'' Loved the first two: Daffy, Bugs, Porky, beautifully restored, tons of special features. But, for some reason, this new set begins with a special announcement by Whoopi Goldberg explaining what it is we're not meant to find funny: ''Unfortunately at that time racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in ways that may have embarrassed and even hurt people of color, women and ethnic groups,'' she tells us sternly. ''These jokes were wrong then and they're wrong today'' -- unlike, say, Whoopi Goldberg's most memorable joke of recent years, the one at that 2004 all-star Democratic Party gala in New York where she compared President Bush to her, um, private parts. There's a gag for the ages...
...''Stealth'' was a high-tech action thriller about USAF pilots zapping about the skies in which the bad guy is the plane.

That's right: An unmanned computer-flown plane goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is -- stop me if this rings a vague bell -- a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.

This is the pitiful state Hollywood's been reduced to. Safer not to have any bad guys. Let's make the plane the bad guy. No wonder it's 20th century Britlit -- ''Harry Potter,'' ''Lord of the Rings,'' ''Narnia'' -- keeping those Monday morning numbers up. It's Hollywood's yarn-spinning that's really out of focus, and in the end even home entertainment revenue won't save a storytelling business that no longer knows how to tell any.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:23 PM

Life Imitates...Advertising

Ronald McDonald was nabbed stealing from Wendy's. No, really.

Well, now we know the identity of the Hamburgler. I guess.

[Update]

And of course, the inevitable related thread at Free Republic, in which he is righteously mocked:

Nothing like swift justice to deal with these clowns...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:07 PM

Good News On The Infection Front

Carl Zimmer writes about the discovery of powerful new antibiotics from frogs. The best thing about them is that they may be impervious to the development of resistance on the part of bacteria.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:42 AM

Science At Work

How hard is it to shoot off a lock? A lot harder than it looks in the movies.

[via Geek Press]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:36 AM

The Truth Is Out There

I haven't written anything about the former Canadian defense minister's recent descent into (literally) loonytunes madness, but Thomas James has a good roundup.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:09 AM

More Iraq Urban Legends

The civilian casualty fable.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:24 AM

November 27, 2005
More Space Plans From "China"

Via Mark Whittington, an article in which he (as usual) takes false hope, with a misleading title: "China Aims to Put Man on Moon by 2020."

But if you read the article, it's clear that "China" has no such "aims." The only person with such "aims" is the "deputy commander of the Chinese manned spaceflight program." He himself makes clear in the paragraph following that this is not (yet) a national goal:

But the goal is subject to getting enough funds from the government, Hu said, explaining that the space program must fit in the larger scheme of the country's overall development.

If Mike Griffin's deputy said, "I think that in about fifteen years, we could have the capability to send humans to Jupiter," would Mark then agree with the headline "US Aims To Put Man On Jupiter By 2020"? Would he say that there are "indications" that this is a US goal?

Well, given his apparent gullibility, perhaps he would.

[Monday morning update]

Mark amusingly (as usual) misses the point:

Of course landing a man on Jupiter and landing one on the Moon are exactly analogous. At least it seems Rand thinks so.

First of all, I didn't say "land a man on Jupiter." But then, reading comprehension has never been Mark's strong suit, either, at least when it comes to reading me. But ignoring that (non-trivial) distinction, for the purpose of this discussion, they are in fact analogous. The point is that a statement of technological capability (and we could in fact send a man to Jupiter if we so chose in that time period, not that it would be a sensible thing to do) is not a statement of intent, or a declaration of a national goal. Even Mark might realize this, if he actually read the article he cites with such misplaced hope, and thinks about it a little.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:13 PM

Her Fifteen Minutes Are Sooooo Up

What if they gave a peace rally, and no one came?

Momma Moonbat couldn't agitate up a crowd at her "book" signing.

The pictures of Mother "Sadsack" Sheehan are priceless. Also note the Reuters spin.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here's the story from the WaPo. To their credit, they don't sugar coat it.

Admittedly, it's a lot easier to draw a crowd in August, when the media (and a lot of students) have nothing better to do, than on Thanksgiving weekend. But in the face of the latest vigorous defense of the administration, and the resulting polls, her time has definitely passed, and the media will no longer even attempt to prop her up. Well, other than Reuters...

[Update on Monday morning]

Here's another pic from AP, with story that is less than genuous:

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan waits for people to show up at her book signing near President Bush's ranch on Saturday, Nov. 26, 2005 in Crawford, Texas.

Note that the wording allows (even encourages) the interpretation that she's just a little early--that the adoring throngs are simply delayed, and on their way. Of course, it also allows the interpretation that she will be waiting forever, but I think that there would have been clearer ways to state that, if it was intended to be the (accurate) implication...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:37 PM

November 26, 2005
SpaceX Launch

Out of the Cradle is live blogging it. They seem to be weather delayed right now.

[Update at about 3 PM Pacific (two hours before the launch window closes]

They need to check valves on the LOX fill tanks and then clear the area restarting the countdown in 1 and a half to two hours. What been driving the delays? weather? equip? Weather at one point - then lox - no other Boiloff of mechanical - doesn’t know 3 camera crews at launch site, waiting Anyone streaming live - not sure Possible further update coming?

Sounds like they're cutting it pretty close for a launch before the window closes. I think that they can continue to attempt it tomorrow and for a few more days, though.

[Update at 8 PM EST]

They've extended the launch window, but still no launch. Hard to believe it will happen today (their time).

[Another update a minute or two later]

Paul Dietz notes in comments that they scrubbed the launch. No other indication of this from my limited (in time) resources, but it seems likely to me.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:27 PM

November 25, 2005
One More Delay

Today's Falcon 1 launch has been delayed until tomorrow:

In order to facilitate preparations for a missile defense launch, the Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) has bumped the SpaceX Falcon 1 maiden flight from its officially scheduled launch date of 1 p.m. California time (9 p.m. GMT) on November 25. The new launch time is 1 p.m. California time (9 p.m. GMT) on November 26.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:58 AM

November 24, 2005
What They'll Have For Thanksgiving

...on Mars.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:16 AM

November 23, 2005
Stuffing The Turkey

I don't know if there's a Carnival of the Recipes for Thanksgiving, but in response to popular demand [cue sounds of crickets chirping], here's my unique recipe for corn-bread and wild-rice stuffing. It's higher protein than most.

A couple pounds of sausage (I prefer some kind of fancy chicken or turkey sausage--this year I found some chicken/brocolli)
wild rice (maybe half a cup)
pine nuts (maybe half a cup)
a pound or so of exotic mushrooms (oyster, chanterelle, shiitake, etc.)
one onion, chopped
a few cloves of garlic, diced
a few cups of corn bread crumbs, either home made or store-bought stuffing
a few stalks of celery (if desired--I don't like it that much, but some people think it's not stuffing without it), chopped
pomegranate seeds (this is the secret ingredient)
A couple cups of chicken broth (from bouillion is fine, unless you want to be fancy)
salt, pepper, sage, thyme to taste
olive oil

Soak the rice overnight in about twice as much water as it needs to cover. Another good thing to do ahead, while watching teevee, is to divest the pomegranate from its seeds (persnickety work).

In the morning, cut up the sausage into bite-size chunks, and saute in the olive oil (amount depending on the stickiness of your saute pan). Chop the rest of the ingredients and boil the rice for fifteen minutes or so (if you overdo it, it won't have the crunchiness). Set the meat aside and saute the onions, celery and garlic in the same pan.

Put all the non-liquid ingredients in a big bowl and stir well. Add in the broth and mix thoroughly. If it seems too dry, feel free to add as much water...or booze...as you want. It should be moist throughout, but not soaked. You can also add melted butter to taste and texture if you like that sort of thing, and your arteries can take it. Another option, to be more heart healthy, is to fatten it up with olive or canola oil.

Use it like any other stuffing--either inside the bird, or under the skin, or just bake it in its own dish, or all of the above.

Eat, and enjoy.

Oh, and on this Thanksgiving Eve, let us all bow our heads and give remembrance to the woman who invented Stove Top Stuffing™, who has stuffed her last stove top.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:51 PM

Urban Legends

...about Iraq.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:21 AM

At Least One Way

...that Iraq isn't like Vietnam. We have no POWs there.

It's not the only one, of course. In fact, the only similarity that I can see is that, for varying reasons, the left (including many of the Dems and the media) want us to lose, and will continue to pretend that we are, despite all the evidence on the ground.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:37 AM

Speaking Of Incoherence

American Future has usefully dissected the New York Times' evolving editorial policy over the past twelve years on the subject of Iraq. Bottom line (as Joe Katzman notes): they're partisan hacks.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:40 AM

The Emily Litella Court

The Supreme Court's Raich ruling last year was a disaster not just for federalism (and freedom), and the founders' original notion of limited government, but for coherent judicial philosophy in general. Professor Reynolds (and Brandon Denning) explain explain why:

As a practical matter, of course, Supreme Court control over the lower courts has been notional for some time. Lower court caseloads have been exploding, while the Supreme Court is actually hearing fewer cases than it did decades ago. But the Supreme Court’s power has always stemmed more from example than from its ability to directly overturn lower courts. Yet the more unclear and hesitant the Supreme Court seems, the less likely it is that lower courts will follow its lead.
That poses rather serious problems for the justice system. The legitimacy of lower courts’ rulings, after all, stems largely from the notion that they are supervised by higher courts. In the absence of such supervision, decisions at the court of appeals level, if they are both effectively unreviewable (or at least unreviewed) and not really guided by principles from above, are simply ad hoc judgments by those who happen to have gotten hold of the case. These decisions are not much different from the decisions of faceless bureaucrats in the Executive Branch, with the exception, perhaps, that those faceless bureaucrats are under the authority of elected officials—the President and, to some extent, Congress—and hence subject to more public scrutiny and supervision than the courts.

A system of ad hoc decisions guided more by institutional expediency and personal preference than by overarching principle may or may not be a bad thing, but it is not a system of justice as we know it. Yet the Supreme Court’s retreats this term, coupled with its self-imposed caseload reductions in recent years, suggest that the Court is less concerned than it should be with its role in overseeing the lower courts...

...With the demise of the doctrine of enumerated powers as a restraint on federal power, the only protection remaining for the liberties of citizens not sheltered by powerful lobbying groups is that provided by the positive limitations on government embodied in the Bill of Rights. Those provisions were inserted by pessimists who did not believe—rightly, as it turns out—that the doctrine of enumerated powers would be enough to restrain the federal government over the long term. There is no reason to believe, however, that the Bill of Rights itself will survive over the long term if the rest of the plan is abandoned. As National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers say, once you start relying on the backup systems, you are already in trouble. But that is where we are today.

This is the consequence, over decades, of court appointments, by both Democrats and Republicans, who refuse to take the Constitution seriously. And if the excerpt isn't enough to interest you, it has zombies, too.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:18 AM

More Smog On The Ocean

Charles Johnson inadvertently follows up on my post, with a shot from (I think) Palos Verdes. Though he doesn't comment about it, note the brown haze on the otherwise blue horizon. That means that the Santa Anas continue.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:01 AM

November 22, 2005
WTF! Part II

OK, I got the computer fixed (at least for now), but now I have a question for all the DirecTV Tivo mavens out there. This is something that has been driving me nuts ever since I got the farging thing.

Why does it fill up my hard drive with programs that I've zero interest in, have never watched, have never evinced any interest in watching? More to the immediate point, why, when I'm watching Fox News, and have a half-hour of it in the can, and am waiting for Brit Hume to come on, and can zap commercials, does it randomly decide that I'd rather watch Seinfeld, and switch to that channel, thus losing everything on the hard drive from Fox News, so that when I switch back in frustration, I've lost the first half hour?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:33 PM

WTF!

Can anyone tell me why I can have video drivers, or a mouse that works, but not both?

Before I left for CA, I started having mouse problems, and machine lockups. I tried changing video cards, but whenever I would install the drivers for it, the mouse would stop working. I just installed a brand-new 128M NVidia card, and the mouse worked fine, until I installed the drivers. Now, it boots and the mouse won't budge the cursor.

Any ideas?

[Update for more info]

It's a PS-2 mouse, running on W2K. I repeat. It works fine if video drivers aren't installed.

[Late afternoon update]

After several reboots, it's finally working. The ways of Windows passeth understanding.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:14 PM

Back In Florida

I was busy all day yesterday finishing up a job in CA, and flew back on a red eye last night. The day will be spent sleeping, getting caught up on mail and other things here, and fixing my Windows machine, for which I bought a new graphics card, but can't finish the installation because I broke the CD drive before I left...

Perhaps more substantive posting later.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:48 AM

November 20, 2005
Why I Love "King Of The Hill"

Hank: "If we tell people that our town was founded by prostitutes, they'll know."

and

"Not Miss Kitty."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 PM

Smog At The Beach

I'm flying back to Florida tomorrow, and it will be good to be home with Patricia, but I thought I'd take a little walk in my old neighborhood this afternoon. If you're interested, click for more, but a warning that there are several pictures, for those limited in bandwidth...

The Santa Ana winds have been kicking up for the last few days, which is why they had the fire up in Ventura. Normally, people who live on Santa Monica Bay have pretty clear air because, like many other things, we import our air from Asia, and it has several thousand miles of ocean to cleanse it. But during the Santa Anas, the high pressure over the Great Basin shoves the air in the wrong direction, and we get off-shore winds. This breaks up the inversion layer in the LA basin and cleans out the air, but it shoves the whole miasma out over the bay, where it lies like a brown layer on a blue cake. You can see it in this picture of Catalina Island.

This is a view from the Strand (a walkway along the beach) in Manhattan beach, looking toward the southwest. Palos Verdes peninsula is to the left, and the island that looks like two islands is Catalina. You can see the smog layer in the isthmus in the center of the island, and in the bay off to the right of it. Looking off toward the north end of the bay, you can see the same effect off Point Dume, up by Malibu.

Of course, the key point is that the air is actually unusually clear on days like this inland (the views of the San Gabriel Mountains are gorgeous today), and even looking up the beach toward El Segundo power plant, the marina and Venice, all the way to downtown Santa Monica in the distance, a lot of detail can be seen in this shot from the Manhattan Pier, though the brown layer can still be seen above the Santa Monica mountains.

Often, a thick marine layer obscures and fuzzes this view, but the dry warm air provides more clarity. Once in a while you'll get this kind of view on a clear day, with no smog at all, and those days are the classic ones that the photogs shoot to lure the tourists out here. They happen quite often in the winter, but then it's usually too chilly to enjoy the beach (at least in terms of bathing suits). When it happens in the warmth of the spring or summer, it's rare, but heaven.

Looking out from the pier, the water seemed to be calm enough for a shore dive, so I checked out the scene beneath the waves.

Just kidding.

It's actually a moray that lives in a little public aquarium out at the end of the pier.

When I first moved out here from Michigan, a quarter of a century ago, there were a lot of little beach houses along the Strand. Now, this is one of only a few left in Manhattan Beach (I suspect that they can be counted on one hand).

I don't know how much the land is worth that the iceplant is covering, but I'm sure it's in seven figures. Most of the houses along the Strand are built right up to the walkway.

I should have bought property here when I first moved, but it's not actually a place I'd like to live. Living right on the Strand is a fishbowl, and you have to be sort of an exhibitionist to do it, particularly in the summertime, with all the people parading right by your little yard, or more likely, front picture window.

Though, if I had, I could be renting out the place for a lot more than my mortgage.

I don't know how much longer that little patch of iceplant will hold out. I imagine that the owners are people who bought the land back in the forties, perhaps with the house, for a few thousand dollars, and it was just one of many, with a lot of empty lots. It's probably been paid off for a long time, and their taxes are locked into the seventies era via Proposition 13. But when they die, it's likely that their heirs will just sell the place to pay the inheritance taxes, or perhaps just to get the equity out of it. Some developer will pick it up, tear down the last of the old beach cottages, tear out the iceplant, and fill the lot with something more mansiony, like this.

It's not really the leaning tower of Manhattan Beach, or an earthquake--just a bad camera angle in an attempt to capture the whole thing without falling down the dune behind me.

The nice thing about the Strand is that there is a huge variety of architectural styles. It's a very interesting walk if you want to see what the rich (and occasionally famous) are doing for domiciles these days. I've also noticed over the past few years as I watch the new construction that many of them have steel frames, rather than the wood frames that has been traditional in southern California. If I were building here, I'd do the same. The advantages are resistance to termites (any walk down the Strand will resemble a circus, with the occasional house tented to gas the little buggers out), and better resistance in a quake. That's a particular problem here, because a major temblor is likely to liquify the sand underneath them.

Seeing all the change in the past twenty-five years makes me wonder what it will look like in 2030. They can't build up, because there are height restrictions to preserve the views of the people on the hill above. I imagine that the creative destruction will simply continue, with the older places making way for the newer ones, and the prices continuing to escalate, because when they say in the real estate business that they're not making any more land, this is the kind of place they have in mind.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:12 PM

Losing Face

Anthropologists say that our faces are shrinking. Well, OK, not everyone's.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:18 PM

Guess The Headline

Here's a story from AP, that has items such as:

In Mosul, extraordinary security measures were underway Sunday around the house where the insurgents died, Iraqi officials said. American soldiers maintained control of the site a day after a fierce gunbattle which broke out when Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers surrounded a house after reports that al-Qaida in Iraq members were inside.
Three insurgents detonated explosives and killed themselves to avoid capture, Iraqi officials said. Eleven Americans were wounded.

Meanwhile, four Christian women were killed Sunday night when gunmen stormed their home in a Christian district of eastern Baghdad, police said. The gunmen stole valuables and the motive for the attack appeared to have been robbery, police added.

The latest deaths occurred at the end of a violent three-day period in which at least 140 Iraqi civilians died in a series of bombings and suicide attacks — most of them targeting Shiite Muslims.

They included 76 people who died Friday in near-simultaneous suicide bombings at two Shiite mosques in Khanaqin and 36 more killed the next day by a suicide car bomber who detonated his vehicle amid mourners at a Shiite funeral north of the capital.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on ABC's "This Week" that commanders' assessments will determine the pace of any military drawdown. About 160,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq as the country approaches parliamentary elections Dec. 15.

The Pentagon has said it plans to scale back troop strength to its pre-election baseline of 138,000, depending on conditions. Rumsfeld said the U.S.-led coalition continues to make progress in training Iraqi security forces, which he placed at 212,000.

Give up?

It's "Insurgents Continue Attacks on Military."

Simply confirming the thesis.

[Update a few minutes later]

Down the memory hole.

The link now points to a remix of the same story, by the same reporter, with a new hed--"Al-Zarqawi May Be Among Dead in Iraq Fight." I wonder if some editor at AP actually noticed the same thing that I did?

Fortunately, I have a screen grab of the earlier version. Unfortunately, I didn't get the whole story, but it hasn't changed that much.

[Update again a few minutes later]

I should note that this isn't (necessarily) a criticism of the reporter. Copy editors generally write headlines, not the reporters.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:20 PM

What Is Human?

Stephen Gordon has some thoughts on Asimov's Three Laws, post-humanism, and personhood.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PM

Journalism Versus Reality

...in Iraq:

Few of the troops understand that the news business is driven by dramatic events, not the tedious kind of process the troops go through every day to defeat the terrorists. To the troops, the war is being won. They see bad guys killed in large numbers, and few Americans getting hurt (it’s fairly common for their [sic] to be about twenty enemy dead for each American loss). The troops see tangible evidence, every day, of Iraqis having a better life. The troops cannot understand why that is not news, and why journalists always seem to be looking for a negative angle. To the average G.I., the attitude is, “what are these reporters looking for?” They are looking for a story, and bad news is a story. Good news is not. As a result of this clash of cultures, reporters are increasingly seen as a potentially dangerous enemy.

Fortunately for journalists, and contra the fantasies of Eason Jordan, Giuliana Sgrena, and others, journalists are not being deliberately targeted by the US military, but if they were, this would be the reason why.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:41 AM

Al-Zarqawi Dead?

That seems to be the rumor in the Arab press:

A fitting end, if true (though it might actually be better for him to live a long time with nails and ball bearings buried in every pore). Let's hope it's true, and that they can find DNA evidence to verify, and if it is, good riddance to rotten rubbish.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:49 AM

The Real Reactionaries

John Weidner has a review of an old science fiction book, and of contemporary society.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:25 AM

Saving Lives With Bullets

A small victory:

As the terrorists entered the street, a volley of shots rang out and the three insurgents slumped to the ground.
Each terrorist had been killed by a single head shot - the snipers having spent the past few days rehearsing the ambush in minute detail.

The SAS troopers had been warned that only a direct head shot would guarantee that bombs would not be detonated.

I suspect that as time goes on, and the Iraqis get ever more disgusted by the "insurgents," and less fearful that the Americans will abandon them, the intelligence needed to do more of this will get better and better. Of course, calls like Murtha's latest one do nothing to help.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:06 AM

Bernanke Who?

Alan Blinder, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, goes into why no one knows or cares about the person taking on most powerful position in the world, the Federal Reserve Board Chairmanship.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 07:19 AM

November 19, 2005
Tressel's Job Is Safe For Another Year

In fact, he's accomplished something that John Cooper never could. He owns Lloyd Carr:

Ohio State (9-2, 7-1) closed the regular season with six straight wins and gave coach Jim Tressel his fourth win in five games against Michigan (7-4, 5-3).

And the game went pretty much the way the season did for Michigan. Good enough defense to win, and a promising offense that only occasionally lived up to the promises. Still, Michigan was only four scores away from an undefeated season. They're probably the best four-loss team in the country, and they did better than I thought they would. Maybe they'll get a good bowl matchup.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:45 PM

Great

I'm flying back to Florida Monday night. And guess what's scheduled to be happening there and then?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:08 PM

Jeez

I want a new congressman. He's one of the three brave morons who voted for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. It's pretty bad when your rep is on the same page with Cynthia "Moonbat" McKinney. Particularly considering that he's Jewish, and she's made many anti-Israel and anti-semitic statements.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:06 PM

A New Historical Narrative

Lexington Green says that the Anglosphere needs one.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:08 AM

More On SpaceX

Here's Tariq Malik's story

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:59 AM

November 18, 2005
It's Not Tax Cuts

Listening to the "Beltway Boys" on Brit Hume's show brings to mind an ongoing frustration with the debate.

Look, tax-rate cut fans (both libertarian and conservatives).

Expunge completely from your vocabulary the phrase "tax cuts." There's no sensible way to talk about this concept, because it's an impossible task. The government has no power to reduce taxes, at least when it comes to income. All that it can do is to reduce tax rates. Reducing tax rates doesn't necessarily result in reduced taxes, and increasing tax rates doesn't necessarily result in increased taxes.

It's like the video games that allow you to control velocity, but not position. Actually, it's not even like that, because physics is physics, and you can learn how to get somewhere with a velocity controller, but economics is unpredictable.

Those of us who want to promote economic growth have to change the vocabulary, and get people to stop talking about "tax cuts," because there's no such thing in any predictable way. Doing so may make it easier to persuade people to support lower rates, and an increase in wealth for everyone.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:19 PM

I Did Not Know That

I'm currently numero tres when it comes to musings on Google.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:28 PM

First Launch

I took a lot of notes at the SpaceX press conference in El Segundo today, but I think that the proceedings will be available at their web site, so I'll just put down some highlights and thoughts. While I was there, I'm probably less valuable as a reporter than as a participant, because I asked several questions. Fortunately (for me, though not necessarily for the company from a PR standpoint), as I noted earlier, the attendance by the media was sparse, so I was front and center, with an opportunity to almost interview Elon in real time. I should note that he didn't say a lot that was new here, but it was a good opportunity to hear it all in one place at one time. This may ramble a little, because I'm one of those guys in their pajamas who don't have editors...

He was clearly confident and happy with the current situation. When asked if he was nervous, he responded that he was actually relieved, because he feels that they've now done everything possible (or at least reasonable) to ensure success of this critical first launch, and are "at peace with themselves."

I think that what came through most to me was that there is clearly a vision to this venture, and that while he's happy for the business from DARPA and the Air Force, the ultimate purpose is not to deliver military satellites cheaper.

He is clearly doing this because he believes that it is important, even imperative, that we help life expand out into the universe (he even explicitly said that--unlike many, he didn't do this to get himself into space--he did it so others could). That's not a usual motivation (at least voiced) for an entrepreneur, and it could cause some stockholders to be concerned that it will take primacy over returns, but this is mitigated by the fact that he is clearly a successful businessman with a track record.

Along those lines, when asked about his lawsuit against Boeing and Lockmart, he noted that many times, if there were victories in such things, they were often posthumus. He said that he wanted his legal victory to be "prehumus."

He gave some hint of what he has in mind for a tourist market, mentioning that a Falcon 9 could deliver a "loop around the moon." One more bit of evidence (besides the launch contract) that he's been talking to Bob Bigelow.

Some interesting (to me) tidbits:

This will be the first orbital launch from Kwajalein
The Merlin II engine will be the largest (by thrust) in the world (though not in history--it won't beat the F1)
First stage is most mass efficient in the world
Second stage is most mass efficient in the world for a pressure-fed engine
He's planning to raise funds early next year to complete Falcon 9 (he thinks he needs another hundred million) but will fund it himself if this is unsuccessful
He'll be designing the Falcon 9 to 40% structural margin (airframe, meaning passengers) rather than the traditional unmanned spacecraft margin of 25%, and make it triple redundant (rather than the single-string Falcon 1)
He agrees that "human rating" may be a chimera, and agrees that it's senseless to design a vehicle to less reliability for hundred-million-dollar satellites than for people
He's encouraged by recent legislation, and will lobby for ITAR relief (specifically mentioning the ridiculous situation that we treat Canada and New Zealand exactly like North Korea), but it isn't the company's highest priority
He's had dinners with Jeff Bezos, and he shares the vision for expanding humanity into space, and they may collaborate at some point, but there are no specific plans
Paul Allen may be visiting the plant soon, but has expressed no explicit interest in investing

He did say one thing that concerned me. When asked if he had considered a dummy upper stage on a first-stage test, he pointed out that Apollo had tested all up. I'm not sure that Apollo was the best model to follow, given that they had unlimited funds, and were in a race. Also, he said that he thought a successful launch would validate their design, but he's mistaken about that. It might merely validate their luck. You can't go and focus on manufacturing quality from a single successful launch--it will take many launches to develop a level of confidence in both design and manufacturing. I hope that they will rethink this philosophy.

Overall, though, I was encouraged, and will be cheering for them next Friday.

[Update late evening]

Michael Belfiore was live blogging it. Clark Lindsey also has good notes.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:08 PM

Why Air Force Space Programs Are Mismanaged

Kevin Parkin has an interesting post on post-graduate education for blue brass. This is a problem not just for procurement and program management in general, but for strategic military vision for space.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:46 PM

SpaceX PRess Conference

I played hooky today for an hour or so and attended the press conference that Elon Musk held over at SpaceX. Bottom line, a launch next Friday at 1 PM Pacific (Saturday morning at Kwajalein). I took a couple pictures and some notes, and may have more info later. Attendance was sparse, at least partly because all the local television camera crews were covering the fire up in Ventura.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:22 PM

Sorry!

This war continues to resemble something out of Monty Python:

The speaker on the tape, identified as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, also said the group's suicide bombers did not intend to bomb a Jordanian wedding party at an Amman hotel last week, killing about 30 people...
...Al-Zarqawi accused the Jordanian government of hiding casualties among Israeli and American intelligence agents, and he insisted al-Qaida in Iraq was not targeting fellow Muslims.

"We want to assure you that ... you are more beloved to us than ourselves," al-Zarqawi said, addressing Jordanians.

See, he's right. This was supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue about 'oo killed 'oo.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:46 PM

Swamped

Thanks to Sam for picking up some of the slack here (good post).

I'm working like all get out (where in the world did that expression come from?) to get a deliverable out to our favorite friendly neighborhood space agency, and probably won't come up for air until Tuesday, though I may be able to blog a little on the weekend. Then again, there is the game.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:15 PM

Energy Intensity

The amount of energy used in the economy per real dollar of GDP, "Energy Intensity", has been steadily dropping and is now about half what it was in 1950. So a barrel's worth of oil in 1950 now stretches to two barrels worth of work.

This is before the coming hybrid capital turnover in the transportation sector to double the efficiency there. So I guess prices will have to nearly double again to curb energy use like the 1970s oil shocks.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 10:36 AM

November 17, 2005
Three Decades

I take all pronouncements about the Chinese space program with a heavy dosage of sodium chloride, but for those who breathlessly (and wishfully, if it feeds their fantasies) believe everything they read on the subject (and yes, Mark, before you start whinging about it, this is a strawman--I figure turnabout's fair play), here's a report that says they're three decades from landing a human on the moon.

That sounds a lot more realistic to me than "one year before NASA." Of course, when they do, they won't need to bring much in the way of supplies--they'll be able to check in to the Lunar Hilton.

[Update on Friday morning]

Mark hilariously demonstrates his cluelessness about my attitude once again:

Rand Simberg breaths [sic] a sigh of relief...

No, Mark.

In order for one to "breathe a sigh of relief," one would have to have something to be "relieved" about. I've never expressed any concerns about the Chinese space program (one of the reasons that you continually go off the rails), so it's nonsensical to describe me as "relieved" at news that simply confirms my continuing skepticism. You're the one who should be relieved, but I know that, on this subject, you'll continue to make Chicken Little look calm, collected and rational.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:04 AM

Roosevelt Lied...

...people died.

No, really.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:33 AM

Time For A Google Campaign

Remember (hey, they won't let you forget!) the standard anti-Bush^H^H^H^Hwar talking point--that Saddam Hussein never cooperated (and never would have cooperated) with bin Laden or Al Qaeda? Well, let's make "boogie to Baghdad" a phrase known across the web.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:19 AM

November 15, 2005
Eating The Seed Corn

Clark Lindsey says that NASA's R&D priorities are exactly reversed.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:31 PM

Not All Birds Of A Feather

I just went and watched the latest GOP commercial, which is pretty devastating against the Donkeys who are currently trying to rewrite history about their own beliefs about Saddam. But I'm not sure it's totally fair. Has Hillary been backtracking on this, or Evan Bayh? If not, I'm not sure they should be lumped in with the others. And it's too bad they don't have a clip of Kennedy.

Not that I'm a Hillary fan--there's plenty of reason to oppose her and fear her ascendance to power, but I think she's been playing the war pretty smart all along (as would behoove her if she wants to win the presidency, though it may cause her grief in the primaries).

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PM

Iraq And The Space Program

I'll bet you're wondering how I'm going to pull this one off. And I'm not sure what the category should be.

But I was reading a piece from a few days ago by Michael Rubin on Iraq, and the connection dinged in my mind:

Iraq is a complex country, difficult to crystallize in a simple poll. But this is exactly what too many news organizations seek to do. On October 24, 2005, for example, the Guardian reported a new poll finding that 82 percent of Iraqis were "strongly opposed" to the presence of foreign troops in their country. Critics of the war seized on the poll to demand immediate withdrawal.
True: Polls do not lie. Iraqis dislike occupation. They resent stopping on busy highways for slow-moving military convoys. They juxtapose the Green Zone's generators with their own worsening electricity supply. They fail to understand why U.S. diplomats who seldom leave their quarters must block off the center of their city rather than build their cantonment on its outskirts. They are annoyed by helicopters hovering over their villages. But such annoyance with occupation does not translate into demands for immediate withdrawal.

Polls in mature democracies like the United States are difficult enough to conduct and get right. The task is far more formidable in post-autocratic societies. When pollsters instead ask Iraqis to prioritize their top-20 concerns, withdrawal of Coalition troops usually ranks near the bottom of the list. Restoring electricity, combating corruption, and maintaining security are consistently at the top priorities.

There's reason here for those who advocate big government space programs to be concerned. Yes, in the abstract, people like the space program. But when it comes down to actually setting priorities, NASA is always way down the list, and there's little in the president's vision, and even less in NASA's proposed implementation of it, to change that. Dr. Griffin is riding for a fall.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:42 AM

The French Jimmy Carter?

I'm hearing on the news that Chirac made a speech (his first public appearance since the riots started) in which he said that France was in a malaise. No word if he was wearing a cardigan at the time, or beset by rabbits. Or what his daughter thought about the world situation.

Anyway, is it time for the French Ronald Reagan?

[Update at 9:15 PST]

Here's the link.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:59 AM

Keep Kicking That Strawman

Mark Whittington once again demonstrates his inability to understand the arguments against his wacky "Chinese-taking-over-the-Moon" hysteria:

Of course I am assured that the Chinese would not even think of behaving badly in space. That would be "stupid."

No, Mark. What is stupid is thinking that anyone has ever made such an argument. Or at least anyone at this web site. Perhaps you're arguing with someone at some fantasy web site in your own mind.

Just more evidence of Mark's continuing flight from reality, and another demonstration of why it's so difficult to take him seriously.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:37 AM

November 14, 2005
Seems Superfluous To Me

If one is to believe the Hindustani Times (and hey, who wouldn't?!), Angelina Jolie resorted to black magic to woo Brad Pitt away from Jennifer Aniston.

I've got to think that something else is going on there, myself.

Hey, Angie, I'll watch while you do that voodoo, that you do so well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:32 PM

Want Some Worcestershire With That?

I'm about a week late on this, but Michael Belfiore is feasting on crow.

Michael, there's an old saying on Usenet, which is that the best way to learn something about a subject you're interested in is to post something blatantly (almost trollishly) wrong about it in a relevant newsgroup.

With the blogosphere, the whole web is Usenet now.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:47 PM

"An Awesome Piece Of Ordnance"

I have no doubt that this will be militarily very effective, but I wonder what kind of safeguards they have in place to keep the bad guys from getting their hands on one, in such a way as to use it?

I'd like to think that at some point these weapons will have security measures, such as temporary codes (good for, say, an hour), to prevent them from being used by the terrorists. I don't know whether it's practical or not, but as our weaponry continues to advance, so will theirs if they can get access to it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:33 PM

Not Must-See TV

But it's worth a listen. Heck, I even turned Greta down for it.

Yes, Mickey, that is damning it with faint praise, but it's what happened to be on at the time that I linked to it from Glenn's site. I would have turned down Hannity and Colmes, too, and probably O'Reilly, unless he had some really interesting guest on (a rare event). But not Brit Hume.

Here's the problem. Political commentary doesn't make for compelling video, even if it offers the entertainment of watching human robots (a combination of natural ability, and many frozen frames as the video buffer fills up). Even on high-bandwidth media (i.e., my satellite dish), talking heads are talking heads, and most of the time I rarely watch, but listen to it as I'm doing things elsewhere in the house. Well, unless Lauri Dhue, or Megyn Kendall, or various other newsbabes come on. Then, for some strange reason, I feel compelled to actually come into the room to view the screen. I've no idea why, but perhaps Robert Wright does.

But I thought the conversation was interesting, and much easier on the ears than the shout shows, and more intelligent than most of them as well. So one suggestion might be to bag the video, because it really is very little value added, and do bloggingmouths.radio instead. Bandwidth doesn't yet grow on trees, and sticking with audio would open up the audience to the dialup crowd, and allow easier storage of shows, both for users and the server, with reduced bandwidth charges for all.

But even then, the question is, what is the value of listening to guys (and gals) talk, as opposed to reading what they write, which for me has a much higher baud rate for lower bandwidth. I had the same problem in college. I rarely attended the lectures, unless I explicitly had to in order to get the grade, because I don't take information in that well through my ears, at least if I want to retain it. I always preferred to read the book, which offered me much more data in a given amount of time than having to listen to someone slowly mouth the words.

But given that I do keep a news channel on in background when I'm working, and I could download the audio and listen to it while exercising or out for a walk, one could certainly do worse than checking them out. As I mentioned up at the top, I know I was. Doing worse, that is.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:06 PM

Don't Panic

Michael Fumento says that there's a lot of unjustified hysteria over the "inevitable" avian flu pandememic.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:09 PM

SpaceX News And Commentary

Jeff Foust has an interesting report on a speech by Elon Musk this past weekend, detailing SpaceX's long-range plans.

Meanwhile, Eric Hedman is pessimistic about the business prospects for SpaceX. Clark Lindsey responds.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:35 AM

November 13, 2005
Innumeracy

I'm watching (in the background) The Wizard of Oz. I just noticed that when the wizard hands out the diploma to the scarecrow to give him a brain, the scarecrow says (apparently as evidence of his newfound knowledge) that "...the sum of the squares of the sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square of the other one."

The problem being, of course, that it's not true, at least not in Euclidean geometry. Pythagoras' Theorem applies to right triangles, not isosceles triangles (triangles with two equal sides).

But then, perhaps the movie was making a subtle statement that having a diploma and spouting intelligent-sounding nonsense is all that constitutes smarts...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:38 PM

Lying Liars

Glenn is glad to see Senator McCain defending the president from the accusations of lying us into war. Me, too.

But the Senator goes too far. In turn, he is in fact guilty of the same thing of which he accuses the Democrats (and the same thing of which many of them falsely accuse the president).

I don't know when it became common in public discourse to completely erase the crucial distinction between making a false statement and lying. It probably goes back further than this, but the first time I noticed it was when the president's father went back on his pledge ("read my lips") to oppose new taxes, and then acquiesced to them under pressure from the Democrats who ran Congress and some "moderate" Republicans. As a result, many charged President Bush the elder with "lying" at the convention.

But going back on a pledge isn't a "lie." It's certainly deplorable, but there can be good reasons for doing so (though I don't think they were valid in this case). But to break a promise is not a lie, unless the person intended to break it at the time it was made. It is in fact not reasonable to talk about "lies" about future events, since ultimately the future is unknowable to anyone--it is merely possible to be wrong (again, unless the prediction is made with the knowledge that the event will be different than the prediction, and is fully within one's control). It may be that the first President Bush had no intention of keeping his pledge, but I certainly have no way to get into his mind to know that. Absent some "smoking gun" memo ("Ha, ha, ha...I certainly put it over those anti-tax rubes last night"), I doubt if anyone else does either.

And that's what it comes down to. It is not sufficient to make a false statement and be a liar. It has to be made in the knowledge that the statement is false, with the deliberate intent to deceive.

Now, I believe that in fact many accusing the president of lying, pace McCain's accusation, are in fact telling lies (that is, they don't really believe that he is lying, and are simply saying this to politically damage him, and are indifferent to, or in some extreme cases, happy about, the degree to which this damages the war effort). But it's certainly possible to make such an accusation and not be a liar, which is to say that the accuser actually believes the accusation.

We've certainly seen enough people suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome to find it credible that people believe such nonsense, so it's unfair to brand them all intrinsically liars. It should be sufficient to call them deranged, unless the Senator has some personal knowledge that they know what they are claiming is false. Accordingly, he should, in the interest of defending the principle, apologize for his own overly broad accusation.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hey, and speaking of deranged, here's the head of the DNC:

Asked what the president withheld, Dean charged that Bush withheld proof that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks [The president never made a claim of such a connection--ed]. Dean claims Bush deliberately corrupted intelligence reports and sent them to Congress.
"The intelligence was corrupted, not just because of the incompetence of the CIA; it was corrupted because it was being changed around before it was presented to Congress," he said. "Stuff was taken out and not presented. All of this business about weapons of mass destruction, there was significant and substantial evidence passed from the CIA and the State Department to, perhaps, the office of the vice president -- we don't know just where -- in the White House that said, 'There is a strong body of opinion that says they don't have a nuclear program, nor do they have weapons of mass destruction.' And that intelligence was not given to the Congress of the United States."

Dean repeatedly characterized the Bush administration as "corrupt."

Well, maybe he's lying, but after the scream, I have to go with deranged.

This from the party of Bill Clinton. Who, by the way, admitted to lying...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:13 PM

Howard The Duck?

Sounds more like Howard the Chicken. Bwwwuuuckk, bwuckk, bucckk, bucckkk...

Maybe he doesn't want to have to talk about his lousy fundraising, which is the thing that he supposedly was hired to do (and if he did it, his claw-in-mouth tendencies might be forgiven). Ken Mehlman would be sure to rib him for it in a head to head, but Russert might have been too polite to mention it.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The photoshoppers are having fun already.

"This doctor is a quack."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:32 PM

Warren Beatty's Incipient Political Career

...is mercilessly mocked by Mark Steyn:

Will he do it? "I don't want to run for governor," he said the other day, making it sound like he's interested in the role but he won't audition. He's certainly in the right party: The Democrats have already taken on most of the characteristics of a bad Hollywood project -- no ideas, script full of ancient cliches, but if you can get the right star to commit to it we just might make this thing fly. And, though he's never run for office before, Beatty has the crucial ingredient: name recognition. All over California, women are going: "Warren Beatty? Oh, yeah, right, now I remember. That guy I had sex with in the late '60s."
...In 2003, you'll recall, the Los Angeles Times assigned a special team to look into Arnold's sexual background. If they do Warren in the same way, it'll be the biggest hiring bonanza in U.S. journalism for a century. Usually, when his magnificent track record of famous conquests is brought up, Beatty indignantly points out that he's had sex with a lot of very obscure women, too...

...Whether this hands-on approach to tackling the problems of the unemployed can be applied statewide is doubtful. No governor can have sex with every struggling woman in California, though, of course, Beatty does have the advantage of an impressive head start...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:02 AM

Weird Headline

Saddam Hussein's defense team has lost 1100 lawyers. Like the old joke of what you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it's a good start.

I was some combination of amused and befuddled by this. I had no idea that he had so much legal ballast that could be tossed. It would seem that the trial will require a soccer stadium just to hold the defense team. How many lawyers are left?

I suppose the next step is for his remaining lawyers to move for a mistrial on the basis of lack of adequate legal representation.

[Update an hour or so later]

The more I read this story, the stranger it seems, and I have to wonder at the reporter who passed it on without asking the obvious questions.

How did these people become Saddam's "lawyers"? Why so many of them? Who is paying for them? I don't know what percentage of the population of Iraq is lawyers, but don't they have something better to do, anyway? Has there been a lot of lawyering not going on because of the large contingent on Saddam's defense team?

And if so, is this not actually bad news for the Iraqis, since they'll now, being relieved of the burden of defending the former predator-in-chief, return to their own predation on the wealth and welfare of the country?

[Update at 10:15 AM PST]

Fox is reporting on the story now. No answers to my questions, but they do say that the presiding judge claims that "...the withdrawals will have no effect on the work of the court."

Heh.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:31 AM

Fast Cheap Flu Vaccine

If H5N1 is so lethal, it might be a justifiable move on utilitarian grounds to manufacture and release H5N2 or something so people with partial immunity to the most common variants could obtain partial immunity to H5N1. That would probably not be condoned because the idea of killing tens of thousands to innoculate and thereby protect millions who would otherwise die in an H5N1 pandemic is morally and politically dead on arrival (pun intended). If we can't stomach 2,000 dead in Iraq, there are many high utility strategies that are not options. This one can be pursued, however, by a determined minority.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 04:11 AM

November 12, 2005
Not Just The Suburbs Any More

Rioting has broken out in the city center of Lyon.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:19 PM

A New Opera

Iowahawk first toyed with the opera form during the Clinton administration, resulting in the now-classic Il Scumbaggio (though it hasn't been performed recently). He has recently penned another masterpiece, this time in French--Le Risibles.

You'll particularly enjoy the finale grande--"The Age Of Eurabia":

When Mahmooooud is in the Notre Dame
And prayer rugs line Versailles
Then this will please the Prophet
We'll get hot chicks in Paradise!

This is the dawning of the Age of Eurabia!
Age of Eurabiaaaaa!
Eu-ra-bi-AH! Eu-RA-bi-ah!
Harmony and peace abounding
all the Jews we will be hounding
No more blaspheme or derision
Imams making all decisions
Mystic Qu’ran revelations
No more homo celebrations
Eu-ra-bi-AH! Eu-RA-bi-ah!

Briiiing the Imams, bring the Imams in, the Imams in… (repeat chorus)

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PM

Setting Her Straight

Emily Will says that Mary Mapes is living in an alternate reality, and that her book is rife with errors:

Mapes: Page 167: "Concerned, I asked her what the trouble was. She said she had done research on the Internet about President Bush's military record and found that he had been in Alabama at the time those documents were written, so there was no way they could be true."
Will: Book version is ABSOLUTELY FALSE. What did happen is that in our conversation on Sunday I outlined several problems with two questioned signatures, and with the typescript of the documents, including the superscripting and the proportional spacing, and I said that I had been researching online to determine the earliest date of production of typewriters offering those features.

Don't book publishers care about this sort of thing?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 AM

Bad News On The Flu Front

Avian flu has spread to pigs in China. This is a common step on the way for it to become a human strain.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:12 AM

November 11, 2005
Remember The Doughboys

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

Note that the number of WW I vets has dwindled down to a few dozen. Barring some miracle medical breakthroughs, in another decade they will all lie (at least metaphorically) in Flanders fields. Honor today the few who are still with us, and their compatriots who no longer are. And thank, silently or otherwise, those in harm's way today overseas.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ralph Kinney Bennett has some further thoughts.

By the way, I'll be keeping this post at the top all day, so if you come back and still see it, scroll down past it--there may be new posts below.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:11 PM

Foul Bait

I just got this email from a phisherman attempting to capture my Ebay information:

We recently have determined that different computers have logged onto your eBay account, and multiple password failures were present before the logons. We strongly advice [sic] CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD.
If this is not completed by Octomber [sic] 20, 2005, we will be forced to suspend your account indefinitely, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes. Thank you for your cooperation.

(By the way, the URL for the frauds is at the domain: http://dsl-chn-static-045.45.101.203.touchtelindia.net/ in case someone else wants to turn them in to Ebay and the FBI.)

Note also that I got this email on Novober...errr...November 11. But maybe Octomber comes after that. It's hard to know...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:49 PM

Changing Times

I'm watching PBS (more specifically, KCET), and they're doing a Veterans Day show hosted by Huell Howser, in which I'm watching a group of Civil War reenactors singing "When Johnnie Comes Marching Home." It's been a long time since I heard the whole song, and in 2005, one feels more than a little sympathy for them, wondering what has to be going through their minds as they have to sing "...and we'll all feel gay when Johnnie comes marching home..."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:32 PM

Rocketmail

XCOR is going to set some precedents:

"We also plan to deliver some mail to California City…deliver it, not just carry some post cards for souvenirs," Jackson added. "I don’t think that has ever been done with a piloted rocket powered vehicle. We would like to set a precedent..."
..."As far as we know, it’ll be the first intentional cross-country flight of a rocket plane…and the first roundtrip under power," Clague told SPACE.com. "It’s basically Dick’s payment," Clague continued, for flying the vehicle in its initial test program because "all we ever paid him was breakfast…and we paid for the fuel."

I'm sure they've got this worked out, but the article doesn't discuss how they handle this from a licensing standpoint. Is it an AVR flight (on an experimental aircraft certificate), or AST, with a launch license? If the latter, California City doesn't have a site license (as far as I know), so how does that work?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:55 AM

Another View Of Newton

Nova is doing a special on Isaac Newton on Tuesday, and they've set up an interesting web site to promote it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:39 AM

November 10, 2005
More Idiocy From The Hollywood Studios

The Frogman says that Jarhead sucks:

They might also have named it, “Cliché: The Movie” because it was basically the Gulf War edition of “Platoon” recycling tired military urban legends and patently false anecdotes.

Seems like a pretty pathetic way to celebrate the 230th anniversary of the Corps.

Hugh Hewitt asks:

How much money would a well-made movie honoring the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Coast Guard and Marines of the armed services haul in?
Why hasn't it been made?

Good question.

[Friday update]

On Veterans Day, here's another harsh review of the movie (and book).

[Friday evening update]

Oliver North isn't impressed, either:

...why do the power brokers and financial geniuses in Hollywood choose to make a movie such as Jarhead and release it coincident with a Marine Corps birthday and Veterans’ Day? The film has absolutely not one character or scene containing any redeeming virtue or value. It is an excessively vulgar movie without a moral or a point. With our nation at war—this film is not just antiwar—or rotten to the Corps—though it is certainly that. “Jarhead” is anti-everything that is good and decent.
During a week when Americans honor the Corps and thank their veterans, Jarhead cheapens and distorts the heroism, warrior spirit, superior intellect and selflessness of America's fighting forces. Those who participated in making this nihilist flop deserve nothing but scorn in return.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:07 AM

November 09, 2005
Making A Real Difference

One of my biggest concerns about our nation is the educational system, but I rarely blog about it, because I find the problem so intractable and depressing that I don't know what to do about it. But Joanne Jacobs has devoted much of her (at least recent) life to the subject, and she has a new book out. Go ye forth and buy it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:59 PM

Why This Plan?

The defenders of the ESAS claim that this architecture is the only one that could get political support. This claim seems to be made in the absence of any actual analysis explaining why this is so, and what it is about this particular approach that makes it more (in fact, uniquely) politically palatable than any possible alternative. It implies that any NASA administrator, who knew what was politically viable, would have come to exactly the same conclusion as Mike Griffin did. It assumes that it was the politically inevitable result of any competent manager.

But this belief ignores the fact that Dr. Griffin has been promoting something very like this architecture for years. It's possible, I suppose, that the sole reason that he's favored it is because he was prescient in knowing to the nth degree what kind of plan he could get past the Congress, even in the absence of knowing who would be committee chairs ahead of time.

I think it more likely that the plan is simply what he's always (well, since the eighties) planned to do if he ever was placed in a position to do it. I'm sure he's quite sincere in his belief that this is the best plan, but that doesn't make him correct.

Some have been demanding that I provide an alternative plan that would be equally politically viable. Ignoring the fact that it's not clear that this plan is, over the long haul, if I don't understand why people think that this one is, I don't know how to formulate an argument why some other one would be in a way that they'd find convincing.

I've got lots of ideas of better ways to implement the president's broad vision, but until I understand from the current architecture's proponents why they think that this one uniquely threads the needle, I don't know how to make a case for any other.

Discuss.

[Update on Wednesday evening]

I'm not going to write new stuff, but this subject reminded me on a piece I wrote right after the Columbia loss:

The lesson we must take from the most recent shuttle disaster is that we can no longer rely on a single vehicle for our access to the new frontier, and that we must start to build the needed orbital infrastructure in low earth orbit, and farther out, to the moon, so that, in the words of the late Congressman George Brown, "greater metropolitan earth" is no longer a wilderness in which a technical failure means death or destruction.
NASA's problem hasn't been too much vision, even for near-earth activities, but much too little. But it's a job not just for NASA--to create that infrastructure, we will have to set new policies in place that harness private enterprise, just as we did with the railroads in the 19th Century. That is the policy challenge that will come out of the latest setback--to begin to tame the harsh wilderness only two hundred miles above our heads.

NASA has learned nothing.

[Update in the evening of November 9th]

Here's another relevant piece that I've written in the last couple years. I continue to be amazed when I look at all of the pieces on space policy that I've written over the last few years, because I can find few words in any of them that I would change. I am simultaneously saddened that it all seems for naught.

I ought to gather up all the Fox News pieces, and build them into a book. Having to put together a thousand-word column every week does instill a certain level of discipline, and apparently results in great thoughts, at least occasionally.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:27 PM

Even More On Sinofantasies

Mark Whittington continues to make false and unsupportable claims about my writings and beliefs:

Rand Simberg thinks that the idea that the Chinese might behave badly in space is--well--delusional. He doesn't say why, which tells me quite a bit.

I don't say why I "think" that for a very simple reason--because I don't think that, except in Mark's bizarre imagination, and as I've said in the past, Mark is unable to actually provide any evidence that I do. Apparently Mark is unable to get his mind around the (what should be) simple concept that I might find his fantasy a fantasy for some reason other than some misguided view of the benignity of Chinese intentions.

Jon Goff offers just one reason (there are others, involving basic logistics, economics and physics) that Mark's scenario is so hilariously illogical and implausible, that has nothing to do with the intent or goals of the Chinese government.

[Update in the afternoon]

Oh, this is too much:

Rand Simberg, in essence, calls me a liar without, as far as I can tell, proving it. It's sad when some people can't engage in debate without engaging in that kind of behavior.

As I note in comments, Mark is apparently as clueless about the meaning of the word "lie" and "liar" as those who foolishly continue to claim that "Bush lied, people died." So once, again, he accuses me of saying something that I didn't. Anyone can see above that I accused him of making a false statement. It is possible to make false statements without lying--all it requires is a belief (no matter how mistaken, or deluded) that the statement is true. So, since I haven't called him a "liar," I rationally felt no need to "prove" that he was one.

As for proving that his statement is false, that's kind of problematic, since that would involve proving a negative--that is, I would have to somehow prove that I have never, anywhere, made the statement that he accuses me of making. More specifically, I would have to prove that I have never attributed non-malign intent to the Chinese government, either in space, or on earth. (I should note that anyone familiar with my writings would know that I don't trust the Chinese government any farther than I can toss Tiananmen Square, but perhaps Mark has been too busy making up things that I supposedly write to pay attention to things that I actually do write).

Anyone familiar with logic (unlike, apparently, for example, Mark) knows that it's impossible to prove a negative (though it's possible to develop a high level of confidence about the falsity if sufficient effort is undertaken to search for affirmative evidence, with no results).

But there's a solution to this problem, accepted in science and courtrooms for centuries. Mark has made a positive claim about me, which I contend is false. Positive claims, however, can be substantiated. Thus, the burden of proof is on him. Since he continues to filibuster, and ignore my demand that he prove his multiple false statements about my statements and beliefs, of which this is just the most recent, I guess we'll just have to let the audience decide.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:46 AM

Moon War

It would be delightful to have a war on the Moon. It would be a good way to spark development and settle on a sensible property rights regime. I don't see, however, the Chinese spending $80 billion on the Moon much less $10 trillion or so to plant a base with 5000 km anti-spacecraft range and the techs to operate it. Unless there is an alternative way to get to the Moon than big dumb government programs, I see the Chinese as less likely to lift a finger to take the Moon than Quimoy or Matsu off their coast.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 09:26 AM

One More Reprise

Norman Podhoretz completely dismantles the ongoing Democrat (and anti-war) big lie that Bush "lied us into war."

As he says, it's sad, indeed frightening that they continue to get away with this:

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.
Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.

Joe Wilson's ongoing duplicity is chronicled in detail, but everyone in the Democrat establishment is clearly shown to be the hypocritical political hacks that they are, to anyone who cares to examine the evidence, and the actual history, going back to the Clinton administration.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:05 AM

The Marketplace Of Bad Ideas

I wish that more people could be this honest.

(And yes, before you email or comment, I am aware that The Onion is satire, thanks.)

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:26 AM

The Need For Regime Change

Helen Szamuely says that it's come time to roll up our sleeves, and go liberate France again.

The country in question and its corrupt political leadership have an extensive track record of supporting tyrannical regimes and terrorists as well as terror masters. Remember who gave all possible help and support to Chairman Yasser Arafat, to the detriment of the peace process in the Middle East? Remember who had close and mutually beneficial relations with Saddam Hussein? I could go on.
It is not only political and financial support that anti-American dictators and various terror masters can hope for. The country in question has provided ideological training to an even greater extent than the Soviet Union had done in the past. Several of the world’s worst, most bloodthirsty dictators and mass murderers were radicalized not in their own countries but in the one I am describing.

Maybe one of these times, it will take.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:23 AM

Ahead Of Themselves

I know that it's only today, but the Carnival of Tomorrow is up anyway.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:01 AM

Intelligent Design By Voters

Yesterday was kind of depressing, from an electoral standpoint, particularly in California, but there was one bright spot, for those who value science education.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:32 AM

November 08, 2005
Lileks Is...

...nuts.

And I mean that in the best (and funniest, perhaps beyond genius) possible way.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:59 PM

How Much Closer To Hell Can He Get?

I mean, he's already in Zimbabwe.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:30 PM

One Quote Says It All

Mary Mapes is still whining, this time to Howie Kurtz (who seems to be largely humoring her). But what tickled me was the bottom line:

Despite her career implosion, Mapes hopes to stay in journalism.
"It's what I'm good at," she said. "I like making a difference."

"Making a difference," ever since Woodward and Bernstein, has become the cliche reason for people to go into the profession of journalism. But judging by the results, "making a difference" seems to be more important than "improving the situation," or understanding logic or reality.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:22 PM

More Sinofantasies

Mark Whittington manages to conflate both a strawman and a feverish delusion in a single post:

Allow me to present a scenario. The United States follows the suggestions of Jon, Rand, and others and stops the NASA return to the Moon.

This should have been "Allow me to present a strawman," (Mark's debate tactic of first resort).

Neither Jon, nor I (I can't speak for Mark's favorite bogeymen, those "others") have suggested that NASA not return to the moon. We have merely pointed out that the means by which they've chosen to do so will result in tears, just as it did the last time.

For the delusion, one can go read the rest of the post. It's hilarious.

I'm busy, so I'll leave it to the wolves in my comments section to tear it to pieces.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:09 PM

Minor Disaster

I just got to the airport, and discovered that my driver's license isn't in my wallet.

I had to use a company badge for ID, and got a thorough screening in security, and have no idea how I'll rent a car in LA. Unless Patricia can find it at home and overnight it to me, I may be without a car there. I've no idea where it is, though it may be on my nightstand, taken out of my pocket after my last trip.

What a way to start a trip.

[Update in the evening in LA]

Yup. I had taken it out of my shirt pocket, where it resided during my trip home the last time, and put it on my nightstand (where Patricia found it upon getting home from work), and then neglected to put it back in my wallet the next day. She's Fedexing it to me, so I'll have a car by Thursday. One useful definition of hell is being in LA sans auto.

The only reason that it was in my shirt pocket, instead of in my wallet, is that under the new idiotic security regime, one never knows when there will be a demand for papers, and it's more convenient to pull the license out of a shirt pocket than to have to pull the wallet out and dig for it there.

And I don't currently have a passport because it mysteriously disappeared on a trip shortly after September 11, when I got pulled out of line for a severe screening (for no obvious reason--I'd like to think that it's because I look sort of swarthy and semitic, but that theory is blown out of the water by the fact that one of my co-screenees was a young blonde woman). I had the passport before the screening--when I got off the plane at the other end, it was gone.

Thanks a lot, Homeland Security!

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PM

On The Road Again

Heading back to California for another ten days or so. No posting until this evening, if then.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:29 AM

Why Should It Be?

Iran says it's not afraid of the UN Security Council.:

"Iran cannot be intimidated by the Security Council. We do not take such threats seriously," Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told reporters.

Thanks, again, M. Chirac!

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:37 AM

Math Is Hard

And not just for Barbie. This article says that math problems are getting too big for our brains.

Well, that's one of the thing that transhumanism is for. This part bothers me, though:

Math has been the only sure form of knowledge since the ancient Greeks, 2,500 years ago.
You can't prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but you can prove two plus two equals four, always and everywhere.

This begs the definition of the words "knowledge" and "prove." Two plus two can be proven, I suppose (inductively from one plus one equals two), but only within the confines of the mathematics that you're using. It's not "sure" or "knowledge" in any absolute sense.

What they really mean is that some of the tougher mathematical problems are not amenable to classic deductive analytical proofs, but are more reliant on brute-force computations, possible now because we have machines that can perform them in a useful amount of time.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:32 AM

One-Two Bird Flu Punch

The Media and the health authorities talk about "it" mutating as if the viruses were all getting updated by wireless like in I, Robot (sorry for the spoiler). In fact, commencing a pandemic will not make a second ensuing pandemic less likely (although it will empart partial resistance). The birds still all have the flu and if flu can jump species once, it can do it twice with the need for a whole new vaccine (else why wait until it breaks out to produce one?). This is what happened in 1918-1919. It was the second wave of the flu that was the deadly one.

I saw this weird quote from 11/3, Prof. Donald Burke in WSJ (subscription required--search on flu and extinction):

At one extreme the case fatality ratios seen in Southeast Asia could be maintained (57 deaths in 112 cases, about 50% mortality), in which case the human species might face extinction.

Last I checked, you need 100% mortality for extinction and it is pretty hard to spread a virus that is 100% fatal to the entire global population before all the carriers die.

World Bank put an $800 billion price tag on bird flu if a pandemic hits with that being 2% of world GDP. They see SARS style disruption. CIA says world GDP is $55T according to purchasing power parity and 2% of that would be $1.1T.

Story has taken on a life of its own. Out of my league. Now if only they would take aim at heart disease that kills 17 million every year.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 06:39 AM

Huh?

Bill Kristol has an interesting, but to me an ahistorical piece in the latest Weekly Standard on how the Bush administration must somehow "return" to its first-term partisan roots:

...contrary to the media myth that Bush has been uncompromising and ideological, the strategy that the president has pursued for most of 2005 has been an attempt at accommodation. It has reflected a hope that he could move beyond the polarization of the 2004 campaign and appeal to the middle. It's understandable that Bush would be tempted by such a strategy: Who wants to go down in history as a polarizing president? But the strategy has been a mistake.

"...for most of 2005"? I have to ask--on what planet was he during the first Bush term? Bush has been kissing up to the mushy middle since his first presidential campaign, when he proclaimed himself a "compassionate" (read, big-government) conservative. He led a politically-correct war on "terror," in which he refused, until recently, to even recognize it as a war against radical Islamists. He has retained Norm Mineta at the Department of Transportation, who continues to fight sensible airline security policy, waging guerilla bureaucratic warfare against armed pilots, refusing to profile, and perpetuating idiotic confiscations of nose-hair trimmers. He tried to buy the union vote with the steel tariffs, in defiance of free-market principles and against the interests of manufacturers of items with steel content, and the consumers who purchase them. His administration has been weak on the Second Amendment, and even weaker on the First, with his signing of a campaign-finance bill that he said prior to the act was unconstutional, thus being derelict in his duty to defend the Constitution, all to placate the so-called "moderates" and McCain wing of both the Republican and Democrat parties.

Between the 2000 election and the 2004 election, Rove became the master of polarization politics. And now, with this year's ill-fated experiment in trying to govern from the middle surely over, polarization along ideological and party lines is a fact of life. Ethics classes won't ameliorate Democratic hostility to Bush. Nor will firing Rove.

Nor will keeping a politically correct transportation secretary, or saying that "when someone hurts, the government has to move," or expanding entitlement programs, or nominating cronies without a paper trail to the Supreme Court, or completely dismantling the notion that the Republican Party has any further interest in smaller government. But these are not new--they've been going on since the campaign in 2000. The notion that Bush has ever been some kind of extreme right-wing conservative is laughable to anyone but the hard left (whose views, sadly, have permeated the media). If Bill Kristol's advice is for him to become more of a Reagan conservative, it's good advice, but it's advice that he needed five years ago.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:28 AM

You Don't Say...

John McCain says that he has anger management issues. He also has adherence-to-the-Bill-of-Rights issues, but he won't admit to that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:26 AM

November 07, 2005
Circles Inside Circles

Michael Ledeen writes about the French connection.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:58 PM

Prescient

Sadly, the current misbehavior in Europe reminds me of this post from last summer:

Sixty years after Paris was seized by the "Allies," and the beginning of the American occupation, France remains a failed nation, mired in political corruption and beset by vast pockets of Muslim extremism and anti-semitism, into which the gendarmerie fear to tread...
...The growing Islamic insurgency in the suburbs of the capital and other cities is particularly troubling, and even after six decades of training, it's not clear that the native security forces are up to the job, with many of them refusing to even enter disputed areas.

Advantage, Transterrestrial!

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:12 PM

Chinese Space Riddle

Rand, Jeff and Dwayne are treating a 40-year delayed entry into the "US-Soviet space race" (or perhaps the Chinese would prefer "space era") as newsworthy. For its military threat or for its ability to shed light on perceptions and the press. I think the interesting story that no one is telling is why the Chinese mimic the dead end space programs of the US and the USSR. It's some kind of misguided nostalgia or timewarped hero worship. It is captured well by Ursula Le Guin's The Telling. What does China think it will get out of a space program other than some more confidence from its neighbors that its missiles can hit their targets? Spinoffs? National prestige? This kind of grand challenge from yesteryear is weird nostalgia like the Space Cowboys movie. (I hinted at this last year, but no one seemed to pick up on it.)

The trick is to harness this misguided lunacy to use it to improve international relations and lower the cost of space access.

I wonder if the same people who discount SpaceShipOne's and Falcon's cheap space access are playing up China's old tired expensive space access as a worrisome game changer. Maybe it's the same reason we dissed China's currency policy--to get them to keep doing it to waste their money.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 11:21 AM

Will The EU Survive?

I don't know if it has anything to do with the Eurointafada, but support for the union is at an all-time low:

Particular dismay with the EU was found in Britain, where a majority – 42% to 40% – believe the UK has not benefited from its 30-year membership and only 36% of those questioned considered membership “a good thing”.
Of the 25 members, only 10 countries say they have a “positive image” of the EU. Again, Britain is at the bottom of this poll, with only 28% regarding Brussels in a positive light. Ireland records the highest satisfaction, with 68%.

All 10 new EU members are shown to be going cold on the euro, with a marked drop in those believing it would be good for their countries, the fugures falling to 38%, from 44% and interest in the single currency is now a minority issue, at 48%.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:14 AM

Revisionist History

From Bubba:

He told us during a Q&A segment that one of the hardest parts of his 8 years was not being able to find bin Laden although his administration looked desperately for him.

Like when he turned down the Sudanese when they offered him up on a platter?

I think that Bill Clinton looked about as hard for bin Laden as OJ did for the real killers.

Read the whole thing--there's disgustingly more.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:29 AM

Newspeak Alert?

I can't figure out from this space.com article on the new commercial ISS procurements why it's characterized as NASA 'subsidizing" commercial space development. Why is it a subsidy to provide money for services, but not to issue a cost-plus contract?

[Update a few minutes later]

Clark Lindsey asks the same question:

So when the Air Force contracts with airlines to deliver people and cargo to foreign miltary bases, is it "subsidizing" the airline companies? More likely it is doing so because outsourcing the deliveries is a lot cheaper and quicker than using its own vehicles to do the job.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:04 AM

Play Your Way To Space

One of my partners in blogging crime has announced a new space-related venture.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:19 AM

No Chinese Space Race

Dwayne Day debunks sensationalistic misreporting about the Chinese space program.

Despite Western media—and political—comments to the contrary, all of the speakers agreed that China is not trying to “race” the United States in space. In fact, the Chinese make an issue out of stressing that they should not race the US. As one speaker noted, “They clearly recognize what happened to the Soviet Union getting sucked into SDI.” They don’t want to repeat that mistake.
A different speaker suggested that the Chinese space program, particularly its manned program, was a major liability for the country because it used up scarce engineering talent that was required elsewhere. Every engineer working on the Chinese space program was one who was not building bridges. This is even more acute because the space program is incredibly inefficient, with far too many people working on it. One person who recently visited China remarked that they had asked a Chinese engineer if he liked his job. He replied that it was great, but he only wished that the three other people who also held it would get out of his way.

Yup. I'm quaking in my boots at the Chinese space menace.

Mark Whittington prefers to live on in his dreamland of a new space race, though.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:44 AM

Cooling The Earth From The Moon

I missed Pete Worden's talk on the use of lunar resources to alleviate global warming, on the first day of the Space Frontier Conference, because I was splitting time between it and work in El Segundo. But it was quite interesting, and Jeff Foust has a report on it in today's The Space Review.

It has this curious exchange, though:

...someone asked Worden after his speech, if this system is privately developed, what’s to prevent someone from blocking ten percent of sunlight, instead of two, and selling—or ransoming—access to it? “That’s where governments have to say that there has to be some level of regulation,” Worden admitted. “Unlimited capitalism is just as evil as unlimited government.”

This has nothing to do with "capitalism," bridled or otherwise. It would be illegal extortion, plain and simple, and the act of a criminal, not a capitalist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:28 AM

November 06, 2005
The Body Is Falling!

"The body is falling!"

Little kids who went to see the new release "Chicken Little" in a New York City theatre instead saw a movie of a young boy hanging himself.

He must have believed Chicken Little.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:14 PM

Sauce For The Gander

Steven Plaut says that France should offer "land for peace."

First, until this plan is implemented in full, we must insist that the French government acknowledge that there is no military or police solution to the problems of violence in its suburbs, and only through recognizing the legitimacy of the demands of the murderers and rioters outside Paris can the problems be resolved.

Heh.

And not just to the rioters:

...we all agree that territory must not be annexed by force. Therefore, we can also agree that Germany has a moral right to demand the return of Alsace-Lorraine, for the French aggression in 1945 and its consequent occupation must not be rewarded. ''A full withdrawal for full peace'' should operate here. Further, France must agree to the return and rehabilitation of all ethnic Germans expelled from Alsace-Lorraine after World Wars I and II, as well as all those they define as their descendents.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:50 AM

Wireless Problems

Is there a WPA expert in the house?

I can't get my (new) Hawking PCI network adaptor to work with it. I'm using WPA-PSK, and I want to use a robust pass phrase, and I do in my D-Link DI-524 router (34 characters), but when I enter it into the client, it lops off everything after the first eight characters. And even when I shorten the phrase to eight characters on the router to get it to match, it still doesn't work. The options that I have on the PCI adaptor are WPA2 and "Any WPA," and I have the same problem with both of them. I'd really like to get a wireless network going here, but I don't trust WEP. (Note, it works fine unencrypted.)

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:01 AM

The New Dark Ages

Mark Steyn says that the Eurabian war has started ahead of schedule, and that Charles Martel's long-ago victory at Poitiers is in danger of being reversed:

''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.''

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:33 AM

Vision

Blue Origin is moving and expanding its facilities in Seattle:

Blue Origin's mission, according to a brief description on the company's Web site, is developing reusable launch vehicles and technologies ``that, over time, will help enable an enduring human presence in space..."
...During an interview that lasted a little over a half-hour, Bezos discussed his plans to develop reusable suborbital launch vehicles that could carry passengers nearly into space, the couple said.

Simpson said Bezos hoped to be able to begin offering commercial passenger flights within three to five years of the initial test launches, with the ultimate goal of helping humankind achieve space colonization ``in his lifetime.''

Well, I'm glad to see that someone is working on this, since NASA obviously isn't.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:45 AM

November 05, 2005
It's Always Something

I've been spending the weekend getting stuff working after the hurricane.

I had to reaim the satellite dish, which turned out to be a major PITA, because the mast wasn't (and has never been) vertical. So I had to shim up the base that it was attached to to get plumb, then reattach the dish, and reaim it. It was still tough, because the elevation indicator seemed to be miscalibrated, but if I'd had to do it with a cockeyed mast, it would have been much worse.

Then I started having computer problems. I have a brand new motheboard, Sempron CPU and gigabyte of DDR 4200 RAM in my main (Windows) machine, and it's been fine until last night, when I got up this morning to find that it woke up dead. I rebooted, and it came up, sans mouse, and after it was on a while, I started to get strange patterns on the screen af which point it locked up again. After trying this several times, it eventually quit booting at all.

Anyone have any theories? The problem is that this is the first mobo of its generation that I've bought, so I've got no other processors or memory to swap out to see if they're the problem. The only thing that I can hope is that the video card has died, which I can test with another.

I'm posting this from my Fedora box, if anyone is wondering. I also have a couple laptops, so it's not urgent--just annoying.

[Update on Sunday]

I finally got around to playing with this. I swapped out the video card, and it booted right up...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:37 PM

November 04, 2005
Profound Historical Parallel

"Rusty" over at sci.space.history says:

The Chinese space program is similar to the early American space program.
Except, Tang is one of the astronauts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:21 PM

Poetic Justice

This moron would have been better off if he'd stolen a belt.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:27 AM

Back In Business

I got home this morning, and after doing a little rewiring on a phone jack, seemed to get everything up, including DSL.

Driving home from Fort Lauderdale International, I was impressed at the damage. You've all heard the expression, "Gee, it looks like a hurricane came through here." Well, it really, really looks like a hurricane came through here. Lots of dead and uprooted trees, bereft of leaves, toppled palms, skeletons of billboards, piles of debris. And it's been almost two weeks since the storm. The house is all right, other than a lot of damaged foliage, and screens blown out on the pool patio. Fortunately, the frame is in good shape, so it's just a matter of screen replacement.

Now to catch up on a couple weeks of business around here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:00 AM

November 03, 2005
Back To Florida

I'm flying home tonight from LA on a red eye. We got power back last night (ahead of schedule, which was nice), but I don't know if I'll have Internet. If I do, I'll check in tomorrow, and if not, I'll check in when I do, so if you don't hear from me, that will probably be why.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:58 PM

Two Prophetic Items You Might Have Missed

The Onion on bird flu in February and Interactivist Info Exchange on hurricanes last September.

Posted by Sam Dinkin at 02:24 PM

Missing The Point, As Usual

In another dispatch from Planet Strawman, Mark Whittington writes, among other nonsense:

Settling the Moon or any place else in space without a government presence is a fantasy.

I haven't seen anyone propose that space will or should be settled without a government presence. Mark confuses legitimate concerns about the architecture that NASA has chosen to return to the moon with proposals for anarchy. He's apparently impervious to irony when, in his indefatigable NASA worship, he accuses others of being kool-aid drinkers.

[Update at 10:18 AM PST]

Jon Goff has a much longer response.

[Afternoon update]

Robot Guy has further thoughts.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:42 AM

November 02, 2005
Norma Jean Didn't Want To Say Goodbye

The supposedly suicidal Marilyn Monroe didn't seem to be in such a hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil:

June DiMaggio tells the magazine that her mother, Lee, who was the last person to speak to Monroe, recalls that Monroe screamed and dropped the phone on the night she died. June says her mother believed that more than one person entered Monroe’s bedroom that night. But Lee took this information to her grave because she feared for the safety of her family.

What?! Surely no one in the White House could have been making such threats.

June confirms rumors that Monroe and DiMaggio, who divorced in 1954 after less than a year of marriage, were planning to rewed on Aug. 8, 1962. DiMaggio had purchased rings and Marilyn had her dress and china picked out. But instead of Aug. 8 being her wedding day, it was the day of her funeral.

Ahhh...Camelot. Isn't it beautiful?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:33 PM

Do They Get It?

Probably not, but Jonathan "Pajamas" Klein is canning Aaron Brown at CNN, according to Drudge (no permalink, which is one of the reasons that Drudge has not been, and is not now, a blogger):

We have made some programming decisions which will impact our prime time schedule as well as our colleague Aaron Brown. Aaron will be leaving CNN and is very much looking forward to some well-deserved time off with his family.
Aaron has made enormous contributions to CNN since his groundbreaking anchoring of Sept. 11th through the war in Iraq to the Tsunami to the recent hurricanes. Outside of the big stories, on a nightly basis, Aaron has provided our audiences with insight into the events of the United States and the world with eloquence and the highest journalist integrity.

Besides his stellar work as an anchor, Aaron stands as an absolutely brilliant writer, evident by the thoughtful perspective he injects into every story he touches.

Personally, I will miss Aaron and his wicked sense of humor. We cannot thank Aaron enough for the skills and professionalism he brought to CNN. Given his respect throughout the industry, there is no question that he will be missed.

Translation: he was tanking us in his timeslot. Don't let the door hit your kiester on the way out.

But despite this, I suspect that Mr. Pajamas still doesn't understand why his (and his previous employer, CBS' ratings were in the toilet, and it amazes me that CNN thought that they could pull up their ratings by hiring either Klein or Brown) network continues to lose market share. When I hear that they've made an offer to Brit Hume (for twice or more of the money that he makes at Fox), then I'll know that they've figured it out. For now, I can only conclude that they know that Brown is a problem, but not why.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:02 PM

Here I Sit...

...all broken hearted. Tried to sit...

...up.

OK, I know it doesn't scan, but the punchline is that he couldn't.

Sit up, that is.

He was glued to the seat.

I hate when that happens (though I think that I would have noticed something amiss long before I got stuck, but perhaps his derrière is less sensitive than mine). He's suing Home Depot, though it's not at all clear that they're at fault. But they have deep pockets, with big bucks. Isn't that the American Way?

As anyone familiar with the site might imagine, Free Republic is having a great time with this. Prescient advice, I suspect:

If he thinks he was humiliated then, wait till HD's lawyers get through with him. Whatta chump!

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:34 PM

It's Not Just Paris

There are Islamic riots in Denmark as well, if Viking Observer's translation is reliable. And the Danish press, no hostage to political correctness (unlike much of the western media), isn't afraid to call it what it is:

Saturday morning a 16-year-old Somali boy was incarcerated, accused of aggravated assault, as he friday evening threw a cobblestone through a window in the bakery. The stone passed closely by baker Børge Svaløs face. ..
He calls himself 100 percent Palestinian, born in a refugee camp in Lebanon 19 years ago, and now out of work in Denmark.

"The police has to stay away. This is our area. We decide what goes down here".

And then the bit with the drawings of the prophet Muhammed comes around:

We are tired of what we see happening with our prophet. We are tired of Jyllands-Posten. I know it isnt you, but we wont accept what Jyllands-Posten has done to the prophet", he says aggressively, and the others nod approvingly.

"Planned for three weeks."

Good way to kick off Ramadan.

Though I have to ask Henrik, or the Danish paper, how a sixteen year old was born nineteen years ago. The number 19 clearly occurs in the original article, but I'm pretty innocent of Danish, and can't tell from the previous graf whether or not it's really sixteen, and Babelfish doesn't do Danish. I certainly don't see anything like the word "seksten," which a Danish-English dictionary informs me is the Danish word for sixteen (and it seem eminently plausible, given that Danish is a Germanic language).

[Update a little later]

You know, despite the reluctance of the media to use the "I" or "M" word, I can't help but believe that this (long but insightful) essay by Theodore Dalrymple is related to this story.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:55 PM