I haven’t gotten around to describing my disappointment with Bush’s speech last night, but he just reminded me, as I listen to his speech in Grand Rapids, that the difference between “compassionate conservatism” and big-government liberalism is getting harder and harder to discern.

I just heard him say that if some aspect of health care (I think that it was prescription drugs) was good enough for Congress, it was good enough for our senior citizens. Ted Kennedy made exactly the same argument back in the eighties, and the argument was just as stupid then.

Let’s extend it to its natural conclusion. If chauffeur service to and from the Capitol is good enough for our Congressmen, it’s good enough for our senior citizens. If free haircuts is good enough for our Congressmen, it’s good enough for our senior citizens. If large staffs and offices are good enough for our Congressmen, they’re good enough for our senior citizens.

A chicken in every pot, and chauffeurs, haircuts and office staff for everyone!

While I’m all in favor of cutting back on some congressional perks, that’s beside the point. It’s absurd to think that perquisites of office, or even benefits of employment, of elected officials should bear any relationship to government handouts to private citizens. If you think that our tax dollars should go to pay for prescription drugs for the chronologically challenged, then put forth a rational case for it, but don’t expect me to give it to them just because it’s part of the compensation of a Congressman.

The EU is going to require that farmers put a toy in every pigsty.

[Thanks to Dick Morris]

I just saw something astonishing on CNN. If you’re wondering why I’m watching CNN, instead of Fox, I’m staying in an extended-stay place in San Bruno, just across the border from South San Francisco, and that’s the only news channel on the cable. Watching Christiane Amanpour bloviate on about what “they” think of us over in the Middle East makes it seem like I went back in time, when they were the only all-news channel.

Anyway, they actually ran a story that described the possibility of terrorism if we don’t take out Saddam, and included the potential costs, which could be hundreds of billions of dollars.

Opponents of the war always dismiss the possibility that Saddam might be involved with terrorism here. I thought that I’d put together a game-theory matrix to look at a range of the possible states of the world, and their potential costs, given various actions.

Continue reading Regret →

A woman was forced to disrobe and parade in front of her co-workers by an unarmed man.

Guess not everyone has gotten the memo…

The Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed on ascent by a leaky solid rocket booster (SRB). All seven crewmembers were killed.

Here is my post from last year, and last week, on the subject.

Others’ memories of that event can be found here and here.

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds…and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of…wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up, the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.
And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space…
…put out my hand, and touched the face of God

[Update at 11:15 AM PST]

I just heard CNN announced that the Challenger “exploded.” This is a common misperception. Not only did the Challenger (the orbiter itself) not explode, but no portion of the stack did, either. The orbiter broke up from aerodynamic stresses as its attitude moved away from nose forward. The “explosion” that everyone saw was simply a hydrogen fireball as the external tank collapsed from the stress of the SRB bending into it, and the propellants mixed.

While a fireball can look like an explosion, it isn’t, in the technical sense of the word. If you light a patch of gasoline on pavement, it will combust, but it’s not an explosion, which is a rapid release of energy from a high-pressure environment. What happened to the ET is more like the gasoline on pavement. It only looked so spectacular because of the large amounts of combustibles present.

Microsoft can’t keep up with its own security patches. Yet they say it’s their customers’ fault if they don’t stay ahead of the worms and viruses with software patches.

Orrin Judd points to an anniversary that I would have posted about a little later today, regardless, but he provides a link to the original NYT story, back when it was the Paper of Record.

Many of the younger set aren’t aware, and many of my cohorts have forgotten, that we lost astronauts in the Apollo program, and not just in training accidents in aircraft. I recall it myself somewhat vividly, because it was the day before my birthday. Thirty six years ago today, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee burned to death in a fire on a launch pad during an Apollo flight simulation.

This occurred less than two years before our first Apollo flights to the Moon (though the first actual landing was about two and a half years off, in July of 1969). One can’t tell from this article the impact that it would have on the program, of course, but it was immense. There was a great deal of concern that it could be enough of a setback that we wouldn’t achieve Kennedy’s goal of “within the decade,” and like the Challenger disaster, it pointed up many deficiencies in the program management, not just in the dangerous practice of using pure oxygen as a spacecraft environment, but also sloppy attention to detail overall.

In addition to the use of the pure oxygen, the hatch to allow the astronauts to get out had to be unbolted, rather than having a quick release (as for example, airline emergency hatches have). They died before they could even start to undo all the fasteners. There’s a dry, and simultaneously chilling, if you have the vaguest understanding of what the crew was going through during the events, timeline available from NASA.

Management was thoroughly overhauled at North American, the lead contractor for the capsule (it was purchased by Rockwell later that year) and, as a result, the program was improved considerably.

A key difference between this accident and the Challenger catastrophe was that in Apollo, we had a goal and a schedule. Accordingly, we dusted ourselves off, analyzed the problem, addressed it, and kept to the schedule.

With the Shuttle, the political reality was that there was no particular reason to fly Shuttles–no national commitment would be violated, no vital experiments wouldn’t be performed, no objects would fall from the sky on our heads, and no elections would be lost, if the Shuttle didn’t fly.

So, two and a half years after the Apollo I fire, we landed men on the Moon. Two and a half years after STS 51-L, the fleet was still grounded. It didn’t fly again until two years, nine months later.

What a difference a couple decades make.

Just listening to the CNN anchor interviewing Iraq’s UN ambassador. She asked him if he thought that Saddam Hussein was innocent, and merely “misunderstood” by President Bush and America. The question isn’t as bad as it sounds–she obviously didn’t believe that herself, judging by her tone. But he didn’t even seem to understand the question.

A smart regime, even if a monstrous one, would want to have the smoothest possible representatives to things like, say, the UN. What does it say about a regime that can’t find a UN ambassador who can comprehend plain English? We aren’t just dealing with thugs here–we’re dealing with stupid, delusional thugs. Unfortunately, they continue to be aided by many who let their hatred of the US rule their thoughts and actions.

So far, anyway:

Adding an extra arm so you can drink Bud Light is like having a doctor punch another mouth in your face so you can kiss your sister.

From Lileks.

Following Blix’ report, the Iraqi UN rep is claiming that they don’t have any WMD, because when Bill Clinton bombed them in 1998, he said himself that he’d destroyed all of Iraq’s capabilities.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so serious.