Murtha is going to be deposed in the slander suit against him.
It’s about time that he was held accountable for his vicious demagoguery. Being a Congressman doesn’t give you license to vilify troops in arms without basis.
All posts by Rand Simberg
A Problem With Our Priorities
Why are we so singularly focused on climate change when there are many other areas where the need is also great and we could do so much more with our effort?
He explains. (Hint: it has more to do with saving our souls than with saving the planet.)
[Update a few minutes later]
Funny, Saint Al doesn’t seem willing to debate the issue.
Not surprising to me. He’s not the brightest bulb on the string, and probably wouldn’t hold up very well to people who actually understand it.
And no, contra comments, this is not an expression of “hate for Al Gore.” It’s simply a dispassionate assessment of his intelligence, particularly considering that he flunked out of divinity school. How dim do you have to be to manage that?
LAN Driver Question
So, I downloaded the latest driver from RealTek to attempt to solve my problem. I removed the old r8169 with rmmod, but when I do a “make clean modules” from within the directory with the Makefile, I get the following errors:
make -C src/ clean
make[1]: Entering directory `/root/temp/r8169-6.003.00/src’
rm -rf *.o *.ko *~ core* .dep* .*.d .*.cmd *.mod.c *.a *.s .*.flags .tmp_versions Module.symvers rset
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/temp/r8169-6.003.00/src’
make -C src/ modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/root/temp/r8169-6.003.00/src’
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6/build SUBDIRS=/root/temp/r8169-6.003.00/src modules
make: Entering an unknown directory
make: Leaving an unknown directory
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/temp/r8169-6.003.00/src’
Can anyone tell me what’s going on? Do I have to have untarred the files into some specific directory?
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, this is kind of discouraging news:
Beware:
The Day Has Finally Come
It’s been a long time coming, but today is Star Trek appreciation day at the Corner. Just keep scrolling. Jonah is going nuts.
[Update a few minutes later]
It’s not just The Corner. It’s Star Trek Weekend at National Review.
More Matt Bowes Details
Apparently, he was killed in Needham, Massachusetts (near the college he was attending, and coincidentally, the current home of one of my former college roommates), and no other vehicles were involved. Sadly, he had a passenger with him on the bike. She died of her own injuries a day later. My deepest condolences to both families.
We Are Not The World
Mark Steyn has some thoughts on Katie Couric’s less-than-royal “we.” And yes, I didn’t make a mistake in the categorization. It is a space post, though it’s also a politics post.
No, they weren’t an “airborne UN”. They were an airborne America. For a start, if there was such a thing as a UN rocket, the Israeli guy wouldn’t get anywhere near it, except on a one-way ticket to establish the viability of Ahmadinejad’s new designated homeland for the Jews on Planet Zongo. I doubt even an EU space shuttle would be eager to admit any astronauts from the Zionist Entity. As for the “Indian woman”, Kalpana Chawla was the American Dream writ large upon the stars: she emigrated to the US in the Eighties and was an astronaut within a decade. There’s no other country on earth where you can do that. And I’ll bet she had no qualms about using the dread “we” word.
Iran In Panic?
Let’s hope so. At least, that is, as long as they don’t actually have nukes…
Why would the Syrian government be so tight-lipped about an act of war perpetrated on their soil? The first half of the answer lies in this story that appeared in the Israeli media last month (8/13): Syria’s Antiaircraft System Most Advanced In World. Syria has gone on a profligate buying spree, spending vast sums on Russian systems, ‘considered the cutting edge in aircraft interception technology.’ Syria now ‘possesses the most crowded antiaircraft system in the world,’ with ‘more than 200 antiaircraft batteries of different types,’ some of which are so new that they have been installed in Syria ‘before being introduced into Russian operation service.’ While you’re digesting that, take a look at the map of Syria: Notice how far away Dayr az-Zawr is from Israel. An F15/16 attack there is not a tiptoe across the border, but a deep, deep penetration of Syrian airspace. And guess what happened with the Russian super-hyper-sophisticated cutting edge antiaircraft missile batteries when that penetration took place on September 6th. Nothing.
El blanko. Silence. The systems didn’t even light up, gave no indication whatever of any detection of enemy aircraft invading Syrian airspace, zip, zero, nada. The Israelis (with a little techie assistance from us) blinded the Russkie antiaircraft systems so completely the Syrians didn’t even know they were blinded. Now you see why the Syrians have been scared speechless. They thought they were protected – at enormous expense – only to discover they are defenseless. As in naked. Thus the Great Iranian Freak-Out – for this means Iran is just as nakedly defenseless as Syria.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer government, if true.
Tragic News
Matt Bowes was a young space enthusiast, who had a blog called Space Liberates Us. I met him at a conference (I think in July, in DC, though it may have been at the ISDC in Dallas, in May).
He was far too young to die in a senseless accident but sadly, the young (particularly those young who want to conquer the newest and highest frontier) tend to be less risk averse, and sometimes, it bites them. He was only nineteen.
When I was his age, I (too?) thought that I was immortal. I imagine that he did as well. But no matter how advanced the technologies, accidents will still happen. I feel older now, and chastened, and mortal. But somehow, because of many of the advances that I read about as a child only as science fiction, but that I can now see on the technological horizon, I hope to live much longer, and my sadness at Matt’s loss (and ours, who knew him) is only magnified by that thought.
From Michael Mealling (who informed me of this via email, noting that it was a motorcycle accident), of Masten Space:
Matt was an intern at Masten Space Systems this past summer. Very sad and shocking…
Indeed.
On Sunday, September 9, 2007 of Bethesda, MD. Beloved son of Dr. Julia A. LaJoie and Robert B. Bowes; loving brother of Audrey and Jackie Bowes. Matt is also survived by a large family and numerous friends. Friends will be received at St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church, 6900 River Rd., Bethesda, MD, on Friday, September 14 from 4 to 8 p.m., where Mass of Catholic Burial will be offered on Saturday, September 15 at 10 a.m. Interment Gate of Heaven Cemetery, Silver Spring, MD. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to St. Anselm’s Abbey School, 4501 S. Dakota Ave., NE, Washington, DC 20017-2795, Olin College of Engineering, c/o Office of Student Life, Olin Way, Needham, MA 02492-1200 or to the MARS Society, PO Box 273, Indian Hills, CO 80454.
Please view and sign the family guestbook.
Here another obit, at the WaPo.
[Friday morning update]
More thoughts from Clark Lindsey, Jon Goff (who worked with him briefly at Masten) and Keith Cowing.
Last Bastion In Baghdad
Bill Roggio reports on the efforts to continue to cleanse Iraq’s capital of Al Qaeda.
Still Having LAN Problems
I put a new video card in my new server, and now have X running. But I still can’t get eth0 to work. It’s apparently a Realtek gigabyte interface, but it’s not being recognized at boot.
Does anyone have any suggestions?