Some folks at Free Republic are starting a betting pool on how long “Hot” Air America (as Ralph Nader called it so memorably yesterday) lasts. Based on the reviews I’ve read, from both sides of the spectrum, it may indeed soon be “Dead Air America.”
All posts by Rand Simberg
Bureaucratic Stupidity
The TSA continues to drag its feet on arming pilots. Fortunately, some Senators (including, surprisingly, Barbara Boxer), are getting tired of it.
“They’ll get the message or they’ll lose their money for the program,” Bunning said. “We’ll put it somewhere where it will get the job done.”
I hope they do. I’d be happy to see this agency defunded completely. And how long is Bush going to keep Norm Mineta?
Short Lived
Here’s an X-Prize blog that barely made it out of the starting gates.
Meanwhile, this one has some news–SpaceShipOne has been doing more test flights in the past week.
Go Out And Get A Job
Europhiles will hate this week’s column by VDH. He says that it’s time to throw our sixty-year-old kid out of the house and make him grow up:
In contrast, the withdrawal of Americans throughout Old Europe
Fallujah Could Have Been Much Larger
Christopher Hitchens has some questions for opponents of removing Saddam last year.
I debate with the opponents of the Iraq intervention almost every day. I always have the same questions for them, which never seem to get answered. Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein’s regime was inevitable or not? Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been better? Do you know that Saddam’s envoys were trying to buy a weapons production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as late as last March? Why do you think Saddam offered “succor” (Mr. Clarke’s word) to the man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York? Would you have been in favor of lifting the “no fly zones” over northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original “Gulf War”? Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all the fighting for us? Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?
Lunar History
I wasn’t sure about the category on this one–it could have been both space science and war commentary. But here’s the real scoop from the Religion of Peace (TM).
Categorizing
I’ve had post categories available for a while, but I’ve been very undiligent in using them, and I wasn’t displaying them on the template. From now I will be, as you can see in the rebuilt index page. I’ve gone back and categorized the last two weeks or so, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to categorizing all 3500+ posts since the fall of 2001.
No Double Standard
In a most disingenuous column, John West claims to be upset because federal funding is being used to “insert religion into biology classrooms.”
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is on the front lines of the battle to keep religion out of the nation’s science classrooms. A group whose self-described mission is “Defending the Teaching of Evolution in the Public Schools,” the NCSE routinely condemns anyone who wants to teach faith-based criticisms of evolutionary theory for trying to unconstitutionally mix church and state.
But in an ironic twist, it now turns out that the NCSE itself is using federal tax dollars to insert religion into biology classrooms. Earlier this year, the NCSE and the University of California Museum of Paleontology unveiled a website for teachers entitled “Understanding Evolution.” Funded in part by a nearly half-million-dollar federal grant, the website encourages teachers to use religion to promote evolution. Apparently the NCSE thinks mixing science and religion is okay after all
Building Your Own House
Stephen Gordon has an interesting post about progress in nanofactories (except they aren’t nano yet).
Is It Ethical?
…to terraform Mars?
It depends. It depends on your basis of ethics, and it depends on whether or not there’s life there now, and its nature. I wrote about this last summer.