All posts by Rand Simberg

Political Commentary

Pants On Fire

Even while traveling, Glenn has a good roundup of links about the collapse of the credibility of Joe Wilson, and continuing pathetic efforts to defend him.

This is the kind of thing that (like all of the lying, spinning and prevarication, and unashamed defense of it, in defense of Bill Clinton in the nineties) make it impossible for me to even consider voting for a Democrat any more. As a one-time Democrat in my youth, I went through the eighties thinking that I simply had policy disagreements with them, but since the Clinton years, and particularly since 911, I now think that it’s simply too dangerous to put the fate of the nation back in the hands of such people. Joe Lieberman would have been the only possible candidate who could overwhelm my increasing distaste for the Donkeys, but they rejected him, and anyone like him, quite decisively.

Golda Meier once said that the Middle East situation would only be resolved when the Palestinians started to love their children more than they hated Jews. I’ll think that we’ll once again have a functional two-party system, in which I can vote for the candidate rather than the affiliation, when it starts to appear that the Democrats love truth and integrity more than they hate George Bush and Republicans in general. (Which is not to say that I’ll necessarily vote Republican–with the ridiculous things coming out of the Libertarian Party since September 11, right now, I have no party.)

[Update at noon Eastern]

Michael Ledeen has more.

Space

On The Radio

Sorry for the short notice–it slipped my mind. I’m going to be live on The Space Show with David Livingston in about an hour. On the air in the Seattle area, and there’s an internet feed here.

[Update afterward]

The interview went well, but I found out it wasn’t broadcast live (thought it was on the internet). It was taped for a later broadcast. I also want to remind people that Bill Simon (transterrestrial webmaster) and I will be on the show next Tuesday. It’s the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, and we’ll be talking about that, and the sedar-like ceremony that we developed to commemorate it.

If you’re really into the significance of that date, it would be a good time to gather with family and friends, and have a dinner to help remember the first liberation of our species (and earthly life itself) from its homeworld, just as the Jews celebrate their liberation from Egypt at Passover.

Despite all the saturation coverage of space in the past year and a half, it would seem that we need such tools to educate ourselves about this new frontier, as Jay Manifold sadly points out today.

General

I Still Want My DNS!

The saga continues.

When I hardwire a DNS into my client, it works. Sort of.

I can get to transterrestrial.com, but pages from Instapundit and National Review (and who knows which else?) won’t load.

This is the case not only for my original solution of Earthlink’s IPs, but also for Dave Mercer’s recommendation of cybertrails.com’s.

What the heck is going on?

General

I Want My DNS!

OK, I finally got it working. Sort of. I can ping the LAN. I can ping the internet. I can even get to web sites if I know the IP. But when I ping an internet domain from a client with no IP (even something as simple as yahoo.com) it goes “Huh!” as only computers can do, and sits doing nothing.

Any ideas what I have to do to get ZA (and please, no more stories about what a fool I am to use ZA–those are not helpful at this point) to allow DNS? Or diagnostics I can run to figure out where the problem is?

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I still don’t know why it’s not doing DNS properly, but I fixed it by assigning some DNS servers manually to the client (Earthlink’s). It seems to work now, but it also seems like a kludge.