All posts by Rand Simberg

War Commentary

Supine

Robin Burk has a disturbing story from France. They are at war, from without and within, and don’t even realize it. They watch the barbarians violently ravish their women, and they do nothing.

Which somehow brings to mind Lileks’ latest screed:

It goes without saying that selling anti-Christian iconography to European fashionistas is a brave an act as reducing the food pellet allotment to your pet hamster; a true act of bravery would be yanking the dead wildebeest out of a lion

Social Commentary

What Do Our Youth Know?

A very disturbing (at least to me) article on the state of higher education:

To be sure, the current crop of students is the most educated and affluent ever. Their enrollment rates in college surpass those of their baby-boomer parents and Generation X, and their purchasing power is so strong that it dominates the retail and entertainment sectors. Credit-card debt for 18-to-24-year-olds doubled from $1,500 in 1992 to $3,000 in 2001, much of it due to the new array of tools, such as BlackBerries, that keep them up to date with contemporaries and youth culture. Students have grown up in a society of increasing prosperity and education levels, and technology outfits them with instant access to news, music, sports, fashion, and one another. Their parents’ experience

War Commentary

A Gruesome Find

…but an interesting one. A mass graveyard from one of history’s most famous and monumental military disasters.

The stunned, frozen and starving spectres who had managed to stagger to Vilnius, many of them to end their days there, had come from all over French-occupied Europe. Eventually, at most some 20,000 soldiers – of the 400,000 who’d marched into Russia at midsummer – finally recrossed the Niemen into Poland. They were meant to rejoin Napoleon, but he’d already gone ahead to Paris to give the news of the catastrophe, and to raise new armies. Men could easily be replaced, but not horses. Tens of thousands of soldiers had died in Russia, but it was because of his lack of cavalry that Napoleon was eventually defeated by Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia, in 1813.

It’s grisly, and sobering reading for those who act as though our casualties in Iraq are anything but trivial on any rational historical scale (though of course devastating, as are all such, to the affected families and loved ones). By any historical measure, Iraq is in fact a dramatic success, considering the accomplishments and relative loss of life of both our own troops and innocent civilians.

General

Up Too Late

…last night watching that weird bowl game. You know, they have the cliche about “no one deserved to lose,” but I think that in that game, both teams deserved to lose. They certainly both tried hard enough to do so. It was like watching Michigan play itself.

Space

Still Time To Change Your Mind, NASA

Over at the first issue of The Space Review for the new year, Grant Bonin writes the essay that I would write if I wasn’t swamped with proposals and other work, on the wisdom of building a heavy-lift launcher. He provides a good overview of the economic considerations, and the myths surrounding them.

As he points out, the cost of NASA’s proposed new Shuttle-derived vehicle will be very high, and since development isn’t planned to start for several years, there are many events that could occur between now and then to forestall it. It is a shame that NASA has essentially ended any further architectural analysis (unless they’re continuing such activity in house), because we ought to be thinking about more innovative ways of getting propellants and hardware into orbit, and storing them and assembling them. That is much more of a key to becoming a space-faring nation than building bigger (and more expensive) rockets.

Philosophy

Oxymoron?

A “knee-jerk militant agnostic“?

If someone is of sufficiently strong opinion on a matter to be militant or knee jerk about it, it’s hard to imagine that they’re “agnostic.”

In any event, as a skeptic, I can’t imagine being upset about Narnia (which I’d actually like to see, based on reviews). Or the Passion of the Christ, for that matter, though I’ve no intention of seeing it. I wasn’t even bothered by the gay shepherd movie, though I’ve no intention of seeing that, either. I was simply amused by the utterly predictable media reaction to it, in which if it isn’t a box-office success, it’s because we’re all homophobes, and if it is, it means that the nation is now all-accepting of gays, and ready to metaphorically walk down the aisle with them, sexuality notwithstanding.

Space

Private Spaceflight In The MSM

I don’t normally watch Sixty Minutes, but apparently they’re going to have a segment tonight (starting in about twenty minutes, Eastern Time) on Burt Rutan and similar efforts.

[Update at 8:55 PM EST]

Clark Lindsey thinks it’s a repeat from last year. Having seen it tonight, that seems right to me (particularly considering that it’s a holiday, and they’re probably just doing redos). But this year or last year, it’s a good sign.

I should note that anyone who is familiar with the story won’t get anything new out of it, but it’s nice to see it being played to the Geritol set. I doubt if it will result in much, but if even one new investor is brought into the game because of it, it’s worthwhile.

I’d also compare and contrast it with the segment they did on Aubrey de Grey, in which they found it necessary to “balance” his prognostications about thousand-year lifetimes with cautionary words from Jay Olshansky. Apparently, Sixty Minutes found the Rutan story sufficiently uncontroversial that they didn’t have a need to “balance” it with quotes from some NASA official or John Pike. That’s a great sign for the acceptance of this new meme.