The mindless minions of ignorant academicians are marching on campuses across the land.

Reflective of the attitude prevalent on some college campuses, one sophomore told the paper, “The U.S. is actually being the ‘terrorist’ by attacking.” Given those sentiments, the honesty of one student about their ignorance of current affairs was delightfully refreshing.

“Apparently there is not enough on MTV about this or else I would know more,” one sophomore told the Stanford Daily. Thankfully, the paper did not poll students about their impressions of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who left her job as Stanford University provost to join George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 2000.

Parents, doesn’t it make you happy to see where your thousands in tuition and expenses are going?

Polly Toynbee went back to Afghanistan a year later. Her answer?

A qualified yes.

An old carpet-maker in a village out west was standing in his backyard beside the loom where his daughter was click-clacking at the warp and woof. Was it worth it, I asked? He pointed up at the sky: “We shouted with joy when the American planes came over this way. They hit a Taliban police barracks down the road. Boom! It was a big ammunition dump, we knew that. But we were amazed at how precise it was. Yes, we cheered!”

Not surprising, perhaps, as this is Hazara territory, the downtrodden, spat-upon tribe that makes up 20% of the population. But what of the bombs that missed, the innocent dead, among them Hazaras too? Hussain Dad spread his arms wide: “How many more do you think the Taliban would have killed in this last year? Thousands! And they would still be killing now. I hardly went out then. If you saw a Talib coming down the street, you hid your face, you looked away. If you looked at them, they said, ‘Who are you looking at?’ and they beat you for nothing.”

But there’s a long way to go.

The pathological loathing of women by the Taliban didn’t spring from nowhere, nor has it evaporated overnight. This is an apartheid society, a bifurcated human race where one half has been systematically excised: mothers, wives, daughters are only empty vessels, the regrettable and disgusting physical function through which men must deign to be born. Men are everything to one another here and their warm and public emotion can be a touching sight. They hug, kiss, embrace, weep together, delighting in each other’s company, laughing and probably making love quite a lot too. (Battles between warlords have been fought recently over beautiful boys, often involving kidnap and male rape.) British public-school bonding with the Afghan men of the mountains continues to this day. On my way out I picked up the latest award-winning Afghan travel book, and it was full of the same weird British romance for rugged men in rugged mountains. The only mention of women was a passing reference to the doe-eyed houris promised in heaven by the Prophet to every jihad martyr.

The country continues to need aid, and religious reformation, and there is still much to be done. It’s worth a read.

Jay Manifold has some helpful info on next week’s Leonid meteor shower.

Unfortunately, the moon won’t be new, as it was last year (if I recall correctly). But regardless, last year’s was truly spectacular, and if this year’s is anything close to it, it’s well worth getting out of town, finding a dark sky, and checking it out.

[Update at 12:43 PM PDT]

Webmaster and astronomical camera designer (and not former gubernatorial candidate, though he’d have likely run a stronger campaign…) Bill Simon suggests that because there will be a moon, that it will establish the minimum background light level, and there’s probably little additional benefit to getting way out of town. Just find a relatively dark sky, and don’t watch from underneath a street light.

Some are claiming, on the basis of an audio tape, that bin Laden lives.

A preliminary U.S. government assessment indicates the voice is bin Laden’s. “It sounds like his voice,” said a U.S. official with access to intelligence reports, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

It sounds like his voice?

Do they think that there’s no possibility of a Levantine version of Rich Little?

There’s this technology called “voiceprinting,” that’s only two or three decades old. And even it’s nowhere near as reliable as a fingerprint. But even given that, we don’t have to rely on what it “sounds” like. What does the actual analysis say?

Get out the crayolas, and color me scarlet skeptical.

And I was extremely disappointed in Hannity and Colmes tonight. They had their “military news analyst,” retired General McInerny, who said that the tape provided a link between Al Qaeda, and the Moscow theatre atrocity, and Bali. And Iraq.

Excuse me?

Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that Osama survived the Tora Bora bombardment almost a year ago, and that it really was his voice on the tape.

How does his taking credit for various activities provide a link?

All it means is that he wants to hog the glory for things in which he may or may not have had any involvement. We cannot conclude from it that he planned, or was even aware of those atrocities, prior to their occurrence.

Yet McInerny drew that conclusion, stated it on the air, and neither Hannity or Colmes challenged him on it. I think they’re all overpaid.

Not that either H or C are exemplars of analytical genius, but this kind of “analysis” seems too typical of a media that’s big on ratings, and shy on intelligence.

One of the defenses of many animals, when threatened, is to make themselves look more fearsome than they are–even those already dangerous. A cat will utilize muscles in its tail to make the hairs stand out, apparently enlarging it far beyond normal size. The porcupine fish will fill itself with water to greatly increase its apparent size to potential predators. The lethal hooded cobra, before it attacks, will expand to present a much larger enemy than the slender neck of a snake, even a toxic one.

Saddam is threatened. Many have observed that he’s attempted to get large amounts of atropine with self injectors.

There’s only one reason that he could want such a stockpile–as a prophylactic against nerve gas. There’s a common inference from this that he has a significant arsenal of such, and intends to use it in the coming (and probably inevitable) campaign.

However, there’s another interpretation.

He’s simply puffing himself up like an adder or a porcupine fish, and hoping that it will dissuade his enemies from an attack. We should call his bluff, because if he has enough for it to be real, it will be eventually used not on just our military, but our women and children.

Gennifer Flowers’ libel suit against James Carville and George Stephanopolous has been partially reinstated on appeal. Now she’ll at least get her day in court.

They accused her, among other things, of doctoring the audiotape that demonstrated both Bill Clinton’s affair with her, and his urging her to lie about it, as he would.

These were the smears and lies that escorted him to the White House in 1992. Couldn’t happen to a couple nicer fellas. It’s just a shame that the part against Hillary (who probably choreographed the whole thing) remains dismissed.

I’ve finally recovered from my scripting problems. I can now post safely, and you can add comments again. Unfortunately, I’ve lost all of the comments posted since the beginning of the month, so if you said anything pithy, on this month’s posts, or posts further back, you’ll have to repost them. I’m also running the most recent version of Moveable Type now, so hopefully problems that some have had with comments will be cleared up, though if you’re using an archaic browser, I can’t make any promises.

It was quite a painful fix. My web host had a hard limit on my disk allocation, and unbeknownst to me, I exceeded it while back at my aunt’s funeral, so when people tried posting comments to the site, the databases couldn’t be updated properly, and in fact the main page was blank through the first weekend of the month, because it couldn’t be rewritten either.

I eventually had to do a restore from tape of the site as of November 1, and reenter all my posts for this month. Fortunately, I didn’t have many, as posting was sparse due to the problem.

Anyway, I’m back in business again. Now all I need to do is come up with something worth writing…

I’m not posting much because I might have to blow off my current blog and restore it to last Friday in order to fix my comments problem (it’s not recording them properly), so I don’t want to create things that might not survive. Hopefully things will be resolved by Tuesday.

[Update at 11 AM PDT]

And in case that’s not enough excuse, the first serious rain of the southern California season reveals that we have a major roof leak. The water is coming inside the outside wall, soaking the frame above a window, and then running down the drywall below. We had a huge water blister in the paint…

So much for sorting through the stuff from the carpet rearrangement, and getting the house put back together. This is the second weekend in which I’ve been deferred from it.

Off to put on my grungies, and climb up on the roof during a lull in the deluge…

An American was apparently among those killed by the Predator in Yemen.

For the first time in my lifetime, the Republicans control both the executive and the legislative branch of government.

OK, I know, I know. The question on everyone’s mind, that no one is talking about–what does this election result mean for space policy?

OK, well maybe not on everyone’s mind. But if you’re a regular reader of this weblog, you’re probably curious.

In one sense, the answer is simple–not much, at least in the near term.

The only immediate effect will be from changes in committee assignments in the Senate, and while there may be people who track such things well enough to make predictions, I don’t. We’ll find out in the next few weeks, since Jim Talent’s win in Missouri means that the Republicans take over the Senate almost immediately, rather than waiting until January, as would usually be the case.

On the authorization side (in which the Senate decides what programs they wish to fund, and how to fund them), the current chairman of the space subcommittee is Ron Wyden of Oregon. George Allen of Virginia is the ranking member, so it’s possible that he’ll get the chair if he wants it. He might, since Langley Research Center, one of the NASA centers, is in his state. But other possibilities are Kay Bailey Hutchison (the Senator from Johnson Space Center in Houston), and Conrad Burns, of Montana. Ted Stevens, from Alaska, is also a possibility.

I’d hope for Senator Burns, because Montana doesn’t have any NASA centers, and he’s inclined to favor more free-market approaches.

But the more important issue is the appropriations committee, because this is where the funding actually comes from. Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland (the Senator from Goddard Spaceflight Center) is currently the committee chairman. I suspect that Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond, the current ranking member, will take over. Like Burns, he’d be unlikely to play center favorites, since Missouri, his state, has none.

But in another sense, we may in fact be on the verge of a sea change in space policy.

Many in the space community cling desperately to the Apollo myth, born of the Cold War exigency of the early 1960s.

A visionary president calls forth the nation to great achievements in space, and in response, it rallies to send men forth to the cosmos. If only we could get another such visionary in the White House, what celestial greatness could our America once again accomplish! Not just the Moon this time, but perhaps we can send men to the Red Planet itself– Mars!

This remains a dream–and a fantasy.

There is no compelling need for another program to send a few elite astronauts to another planet, to entertain the plebes remaining behind, viewing as voyeurs, and it’s futile and naive to expect such an initiative from an administration desperate to win reelection and cement its new-found powers two years from now. Other issues are much more vital to the American people, and they will be given the focus.

But for those interested in truly creating a space-faring civilization, that’s good news. It means that the Bush administration, which is reflexively pro-business and pro- enterprise, will be able to quietly build a space policy that reflects those values, which has been missing for the past four decades. Moreover, they’ll be able to do it with the cooperation of Congress, which now owes them its power, and the administration will have some clout with which to fight the intrinsic tendency to convert space policy to district pork.

There are already hints of this in the floating of ideas about privatizing the space shuttle, at least to the extent of taking it away from NASA.

The last time our nation had great accomplishments in space, we had a relatively young, vigorous president, who had control of the Congress, and immense popularity. He had appointed a NASA administrator who had the close ear of the Vice President.

Then, the president was John F. Kennedy, and the administrator and VP were Jim Webb and Lyndon Johnson.

Today, it is George W. Bush, with Sean O’Keefe and Dick Cheney.

The visions are not the same, but the political planetary alignments are. If George W. Bush wants to make an imprint on the future of the human future in space, he couldn’t have chosen a better team or circumstance with which to make it happen, and with his recent electoral victory, that team will be more able to fight the natural tendency of Congress to substitute pork for progress.

The key now is for the administration to decide just what it is they want to accomplish in space.

In the past, the goal of the US has been to “maintain leadership.” But that’s a paltry goal, in a world in which the second-best space power can barely (or not at all) afford to hold up its end of the space station deal.

We need to establish a more concrete national goal, one that can be stated in absolute terms, rather than one that is only relative to the rest of the space midgets on the planet. Our goal should be to establish a truly space-faring civilization, and that doesn’t mean flying a space shuttle every few months.

It means that we have routine transport to and from space, that a large majority of the population can afford it, and that it provides an infrastructure not only for national defense, but for all who want to seek their dreams off planet.

That, rather than “world leadership,” is a goal worth supporting, and urging upon an administration with the new- found political heft to make it happen. The actual policies required to implement such an achievement may be expensive, or they may simply require some changes in regulations that (inadvertently) adverse effects on space enterprise.

Either way, the administration is unlikely to pursue them absent some sense of public interest. The opportunity now is perhaps greater than it’s been in four decades.

Make your desires known.