Reuters is laying off a hundred and fifty people in north America.

One man’s pink slip is another’s excuse to sleep in.

Reuters is laying off a hundred and fifty people in north America.

One man’s pink slip is another’s excuse to sleep in.

Jonah has an amusing lecture for idiotarians who prostrate themselves before the confederacy of dunces on the East River, aka the UN.

But this post is actually about a not inapt description of them. He called them a “parliament of crapweasels.”

I always thought that “parliament” was the affinitive term for owls.

I don’t now what it is for crapweasels, but it might be amusing to host a little contest in the comments section.

I’ll start it off:

An outhouse of crapweasels…

Alan Henderson has discovered a very old news report of European anti-war protestors.

[via Jay Manifold]

I wish Ikea could be this clear in their assembly instructions.

Roger Bellettie has an amusing image of one of the pylons on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (the modified Boeing 747 that is used to ferry Orbiters when they have to be moved from one location to another).

In case you have trouble making out the wording, it says:

Remember this next time someone says that NASA has no sense of humor.

In the runup to last week’s election, some people were unhappy to see NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe actively campaigning for Republican candidates.

“Has the administrator forgotten who holds NASA’s purse strings? It seems to me that after campaigning for Republican candidates, it will be pretty difficult to go to Congressional Democrats and ask them to support NASA’s work. If the Democrats take over both houses of Congress, which is a real possibility, where does that leave NASA? The administrator, at this point, is putting Republican Party politics ahead of what is in NASA’s best interest.”

So it would have been all right if he’d had the prescience to know that the Republicans were going to retain the House and take over the Senate? It was all right for his predecessor, Dan Goldin, to campaign with Senator Barbara Mikulski (scroll down the page for the story) in 1992, because everyone knew that the Democrats were going to retain both houses of Congress in perpetuity?

These particular folks’ unhappiness is hardly shocking since, as a union, they generally favor the Democrats, and are thus discomfited by any administration official campaigning for Republicans, let alone the one whose agency disburses funding to many of their employers.

The NASA administrator is a politically-appointed position, like any cabinet member. It is common, and even expected, for such people to campaign for and with other administration officials to help elect a Congress that will support the administration’s goals.

Thus, their rationale strikes me as somewhat disingenuous.

But there’s another, deeper issue underlying this complaint.

One of the “genesis myths” of NASA is that it was established to explore for “all mankind,” and for the pureness of science and the thrill of exploration, in a nobleness of goal and spirit that is uncolored by crass political calculation.

Thus, the space program has always had an aura of being sacrosanct, as above politics, so even those who have no dog in the political fight are often disconcerted by what they see as the ugly intrusion of partisanship into the agency. To paraphrase a political aphorism, “politics stops at the atmosphere’s edge.”

Like many beliefs about space and NASA, this one is lofty and idealistic. It is also nonsensical, and holds us back from true accomplishment in space.

I hesitate to claim that the current space program is a Democratic space program, because Republicans have bought into it over the decades as well. Ronald Reagan made the decision to initiate the program that resulted in the present disaster called the International Space Station.

But clearly, if one were examining policy anew, as a disinterested observer with no stake in the outcome, one would view the program philosophy as much more fundamentally Democratic than Republican.

This is not just because it continues to roll down the groove of the legacy of JFK and LBJ. It is a large government program having few attributes of private enterprise, which are characteristics generally favored by the Democrats. The fact that, in its current form, it’s received a great deal of support from Republicans as well can probably be attributed to institutional memory of it as an essential component of the Cold War in the 1960s. Republicans tend to favor federal programs that are perceived, whether in fact, or from associative memory, to be contributing to the national security.

But imagine a world in which the Cold War hadn’t happened, but space technology had. Would Republicans support a massive socialistic state enterprise that had no other purpose than to fly a few people a year into space, for many billions of dollars per annum?

Or would they rather endorse a policy that instead harnessed the power of the market and free enterprise, without burdening the long-suffering taxpayer, to allow people to pursue their dreams on a new frontier?

My largest complaint with space policy is that to the degree that it’s debated at all, it seems to be within the forty-yard lines. There are a large number of implicit assumptions that underlie it, which are almost unquestionable, regardless of the party of the debators.

Viz: Space is about science, space is for all mankind, space is for promoting international cooperation and high-technology jobs, etc.

The debate is never about the ends–it’s always about false choices, and only about the amount of budget to be devoted toward it, or the best means of achieving them: robots or humans, space station or not.

What I want to see is a debate about what we are trying to achieve in space.

I want to see a debate about our space goals that is actually framed in terms of the two parties’ supposed philosophies–big government versus private enterprise. Collective effort versus individualism. Vicarious exploration by an annointed few versus the opening of the high frontier for the masses.

That is a national debate that has never occurred in the forty-five years that we’ve had a space program.

Once we resolve that issue, the debate about how to achieve it will become much more interesting as well. It might finally have the effect of removing the blinders from the Republicans on this issue, in which they seemingly check their brains at the door when it comes to discussing our newest frontier.

I’ve had more than enough of a non-partisan space program, in which the only issue is which Congressional district (Republican or Democrat) will benefit from a given policy decision, rather than how the American people will benefit.

Space represents our future, and it is as important to it as the New World was to the Europeans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, even if they didn’t understand it at the time. It deserves to have a full-throated discussion about its potential and the best means by which to bring it to full flower.

I know that some, even many, will (ironically, considering that it’s a government program) deplore the notion of making space “political and partisan.” Do they really fear that doing so will somehow damage our prospects for progress?

If so, consider this.

With space vehicles that cost half a billion dollars per launch, four times a year, and a space station that has cost us tens of billions of dollars to support at most half a dozen astronauts, and no obvious plans toward significantly more capability, it’s a fair question to ask–could we do much worse?

Robert Fisk is convinced that bin Laden’s latest is genuine.

Of course, Bobby never met a terrorist he didn’t believe…

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.