Supposed leftist Mark Grueter has an interesting essay on the “self-righteous dupes” who would keep Saddam in power.

Most of the same people that oppose a war against Saddam opposed the war in Afghanistan, as well as the war on terrorism in general. And they are making very similar arguments in all cases, which, when simplified amount to something like, ?a war will do much more harm than any good.? However, their dire predictions about Afghanistan were shown to be false. The campaign did not create a humanitarian catastrophe, scores of people did not starve to death (6 million was the estimate); millions of refugees did not pour over the border; it did not become a ?quagmire.? (Refer to any of the literature coming out of the Left, in September and October 2001 especially, for examples of these claims). Civilian casualties were avoided whenever possible, in part because of the precision technology mastered over years of massive military budgets. Noam Chomsky and his co-thinkers like to cite a former professor of mine, Marc Herold, who calculated that US bombings have killed 3,000 Afghani civilians (?at least?) and counting. Herold derived this figure from a collection of European and Arab newspaper reports. The presumed and often stated objective of this tally is to demonstrate moral equivalence between the 9/11 incident and US retaliation.

All other non-Pentagon, usually left-leaning efforts to add up the numbers have yielded much lower results (approximately 1,000 was the highest). And there is an important moral and intellectual distinction between premeditated killing, which is murder, and unintentional killing or killing in self-defense, which is not. The long-term effect of the raid will almost certainly end up saving many more lives (and provide improved lives for millions more) in the long run than those that were taken away. This is grim business for sure, but as long as the ?principled? Left refuses to engage in this complex, necessary debate it cannot have an impact on actual policy. In this sense Hitchens is correct – the Left is ?irrelevant.?

He once again exposes the current left as not so much for anything, as against Amerikkka.

Martin Walker explains why the proclamations of Tony Blair’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

Martin Walker explains why the proclamations of Tony Blair’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

Martin Walker explains why the proclamations of Tony Blair’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

How can this story be true? I was told that we’ve been much too distracted by the unnecessary attack on Iraq to wage the “war on terrorism.”

Here’s an interesting backstory on TWA Flight 800. I don’t have any other information on it, only Jack Cashill’s take, but if he’s correct, there was clearly a lot of hanky panky going on in the investigation. I don’t have any firm opinions about what actually happened, but as in the Vince Foster case, I don’t lend much credibility to the official report.

It will be interesting to see if any media besides World Net Daily pick this up.

Apparently the Dixie Chicks made some comments the other day in London about being ashamed to share a home state with the President.

“I feel the president is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world,” Maines said in the statement. “My comments were made in frustration and one of the privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your own point of view.” And while Maines maintains her beef with Bush, she’s much more supportive of the United States troops.

“While we support our troops, there is nothing more frightening than the notion of going to war with Iraq and the prospect of all the innocent lives that will be lost,” Maines said.

It wasn’t reported whether or not she had any fright, or even mild concern, about all the innocent lives that are currently being lost under Saddam’s brutal regime.

I can’t imagine that this will be helpful to their record sales. It seems to me that few people will go out and buy an album because they hear an artist say something with which they feel political sympathy, but I’m sure that there are many, particularly among their audience, who will boycott them over stupid statements.

In a few days, or weeks, or months, depending on the vagaries of international diplomacy, we will be “carpet bombing” Iraq, and killing many thousands of innocent civilians, if the opponents of the next major battle in the war are to be believed.

Of course, that’s nonsense.

Those who make such claims are not just ignorant of military history, but current military technology.

“Carpet bombing” is a specific phrase, to be applied to a specific tactic, which is to bombard an area with bombs, indiscriminately, to ensure that whatever target is…well…a target, is to be utterly obliterated.

It is not just a phrase, but a concept, from the past.

We did it in World War II, when we bombed Dresden and Tokyo, and created huge firestorms in those cities, which destroyed them and killed many thousands of their civilian inhabitants. Whether or not they were innocent depends, of course, on your view of the culpability of the populace for their bloodthirsty leadership. We also did it in North Vietnam.

Fortunately, and contrary to those who think that we are invading Iraq for oil, or global hegemony, and are willing to kill thousands, even hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians to do carry out our evil designs, modern space-based weaponry will allow us to accomplish our actual goals of liberation of the Iraqi people, and increased US security, without having do to so.

In past wars, decades ago, our technology was limited. We had crude propeller-driven bombers, with passive bombs constrained by laws of physics going back to Galileo. Yes, yes, we had Norden bombsights that could “drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet.”

But the “pickle barrel” claims were exaggerated. In fact, while the firestorms of Dresden and Tokyo were actually worse than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in terms of destruction and loss of life, it was partly because our capability of delivering weapons was unfathomably crude by today’s standards.

Today, we have precision-guided munitions, with the ability to accurately hit an individual target within a dozen yards, and our ability to do so is driven largely by space technology.

Millions of Americans today drive, hunt, fish and hike with now-ubiquitous personal Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. They’ve become so much a part of daily life that many have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, that the system was originally designed and built by the Pentagon to aid our military. The investment in that reliable constellation of satellites high overhead paid off hugely in the first Gulf War, allowing our troops to move across roadless and moonless deserts, taking the Iraqi army totally by surprise from an unexpected direction.

The other thing that awed the enemy in that war was our cruise missiles and guided bombs, that almost literally could be dropped into the proverbial pickle barrel, but such weaponry was actually used to only a limited extent, being new technology and very expensive at the time. In the dozen years of armistice in that conflict, about to be renewed, such weapons have gotten much cheaper, and proved their value in the liberation of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. One of the reasons for the delay (not “rush”) to renewed fighting in Iraq was to allow time to rebuild our inventories of them.

We have restocked now, and such munitions will be a major component of the war, allowing us to selectively destroy military targets while leaving totally unharmed civilians in adjacent buildings.

But as we grow ever more dependent on our large array of satellites to serve as our military’s eyes and ears, and more nations develop space launch capability, we will face a new vulnerability and threat–anti-satellite weapons. With our new doctrines and tactics, the loss of even a fraction of our orbital assets would be militarily disastrous, and right now, we have neither the means to defend them, or the ability to quickly replace them, because our launch infrastructure remains expensive and unresponsive.

It would take years and many billions of dollars to replace the dozens of satellites in the GPS constellation. And the satellites themselves are expensive largely because of the difficulty and cost of getting them to their place of business. If launch were cheap and routine, satellites could be also, because they wouldn’t have such a need for high reliability, and the costly process of extreme weight minimization could be dispensed with.

I expect that the upcoming liberation of Iraq will demonstrate far beyond any remaining doubts how essential space has become to our ability to protect our nation, with minimal loss of life of both our own troops and innocent civilians. It is time to start thinking seriously about developing routine access to orbit, both to ensure our continued ability to utilize this new high ground, and to expand such utility in new ways. This won’t necessarily require fleets of military launch systems, however.

Much of our equipment and troops were delivered to the Middle East on commercial aircraft, via a program called the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF). Airlines and cargo companies (such as Federal Express) are provided with subsidies by the Pentagon, in return for the use of their aircraft in times of need. This allows the Department of Defense to maintain a large airlift capacity without having to maintain its own dedicated fleet of transports.

CRAF is a program that was applied to an existing industry, but consider the possibility of something similar–a Civil Reserve Space Fleet–that could be used to encourage the creation of a new space transportation industry, using reusable space transports.

We have a confluence of requirements for safe, low-cost launch. NASA can no longer rely on the Shuttle, there is growing interest in public space travel and tourism, and the military needs reliable and affordable access to defend and replace its increasingly-critical space assets.

On the eve of a battle that will once again demonstrate the criticality of space in defending freedom and saving lives, surely we can come up with sensible yet innovative policy that can allow these needs to be served by incentivizing a new and vital private industry. Such a foresighted and enlightened policy would finally make us a truly space-faring nation, and allow the life-saving potential of space technology to continue to flower far beyond the impressive strides that it’s made to date.

I found a nifty explanation (written for scientists and engineers) of the proper use of the restrictive versus the non-restrictive clause. It uses (naturally) set theory.

The confusion between “that” and “which” is very common, even among professional writers and journalists, and many otherwise superlative bloggers (I’m looking at you, Mr. Den Beste…). Read it, and improve your writing almost instantly.

This really isn’t a nitpick, like dangling participles and split infinitives. The words really do mean different things, and wrong usage actually changes the meaning of the sentence, though it’s usually possible to figure out what the writer meant. The author of the link above has another page in which she explains why it’s so important.

Anyway, the use of “which” for “that” is always jarring to my eyes, particularly because I generally expect the former to be accompanied by a comma, and it never is when used incorrectly.

The New Mexico state assemblyman from Roswell wants to have a state holiday to honor space aliens.

Extraterrestrial Culture Day would be held the second Thursday of February and would honor space travelers from other worlds and even give a nod to creatures made famous in movies, such as E.T. in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster film.

In July of each year, thousands of earthly visitors descend on Roswell, the self- appointed alien capital of the world, where many UFO buffs believe an alien craft crash-landed in 1947, based on claims that alien bodies were discovered there.

The town’s population of 45,000 doubles and even triples during the week long festival that includes speakers on extraterrestrial life, UFOs and other anomalies such as crop circles.

Foley feels the same excitement — and economic benefit– can be spread to the rest of the state by adding a state-sanctioned day of alien celebration.

“If we can capitalize on something that did or did not happen in 1947 then it can help the entire state,” Foley said.

Way to put your state on the map, Assemblyman Foley…

Too bad we can’t get them interested in Roswell for something that we know happened there–it was the site of much of Robert Goddard’s pioneering work on rocketry.