All posts by Rand Simberg

War Commentary

Summer Fun

I was listening to Fox just now, and they ran a report on summer camp for Palestinian children, at which instead of making lanyards and leather products, learning to swim or sail, and engaging in various sports, they are learning to sneak past Israeli checkpoints, and the virtues of dying for the Palestinian cause. You know, the kind of child abuse that Charles Johnson documents on a regular basis.

And then I recalled that people like Human Rights Watch have actually expressed concern about the use of children as soldiers. Surely, thought I, they will have had something to say about this?

I wandered over to see, and sure enough, it’s a major area of concern. So I clicked on the link on the right of the page, for specific area reports, confident that I’d find the abuse described above reported in detail, with appropriate opprobrium.

But (and I know you’ll be amazed to hear this), there was no obvious mention of it among the reports as listed. Oh, wait, down toward the bottom, there’s a discussion of Lebanon, which at least is in the neighborhood. We discover there that some civilians have been expelled from Lebanon for refusing to join a militia.

Well, that sounds promising. Of course, am I cynical to suspect that the only reason this gets a mention is because, according to the little blurb, it is “an Israeli auxiliary militia”?

But of course.

But I wanted to be fair, so I decided to dig down another level, to the latest (2003) overall HRW report on the subject.

This showed a little more promise–it has a section called “ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES.”

Surely, I thought, now we’ll find out about all of this turning young Arab children into Jew-hating killbots.

Imagine my surprise again, to learn that they discuss:

  • Israel holding teenagers in the same prisons with adult men.
  • Israel using youth as informers against Hamas and Islamic Jihad
  • Israel allowing seventeen-year-olds to volunteer for the IDF
  • Arrest and interrogation of children suspected of throwing rocks, by (you guessed it) Israel

Now, arguably some of these, if true, can certainly be said to be human rights violations, but I’m straining my brain to determine how they constitute forcing children to be soldiers, which I thought was the point of this particular report. And as to the Palestinian summer camps that Charles and others point out?

There was no evidence that the Palestinian Authority (PA) recruited or used child soldiers. In May 2002, the PA addressed the United Nations Special Session on Children and advocated the application of the CRC-OP-CAC, which prohibits the use in hostilities of those under the age of eighteen.129 In 2002, the PA also reaffirmed its commitment to the Coalition not to use children in hostilities in a private communication…

…During 2002, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad disavowed the use of children after under-18s were involved in suicide bombings and armed attacks on Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. A Hamas statement in April 2002 called on mosque imams

General Science

A Fowl Fate

I couldn’t quite figure out how to categorize this one. There are stories of children being raised by wolves, but here’s the first case, at least of which I’m aware, of a man being raised by chickens.

It will be certain to be the butt of jokes, but of course it’s a tragic situation. I really mean it–once you get past the absurdity of it, it really was catastrophic for the poor guy.

But it could have been worse–he was fortunate that it happened after he had at least developed the ability to speak. Children raised without human contact from birth never develop the ability to do so–there’s a certain critical point in development and the wiring of the brain during which speech is acquired, and if you miss it, you’ve apparently missed it forever. The story claims that he is learning (or relearning) how to speak, and presumably to eat with utensils instead of pecking.

Of course, as the old joke in the Woody Allen movie (Annie Hall?) went, they may not want to go too far in rehabilitating him. They won’t get any more eggs. Besides, he may have a thrilling career ahead of him as a sports team mascot.

Space

A Moore’s Law For Spaceflight?

Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.

While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.

Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.

Space

A Moore’s Law For Spaceflight?

Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.

While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.

Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.

Space

A Moore’s Law For Spaceflight?

Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.

While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.

Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.