One gets the feeling that Mr. Lileks, a proud denizen of Minnesota, isn’t going to be voting for Fritz Mondale.

John Gibson is reporting that Saddam’s email account was hacked by guessing passwords.

Hmmmm….

“presidentforlife”
“kuwaitismine”
“deathtoamerica”
“killthebushes”
“disembowel”

John Gibson is reporting that Saddam’s email account was hacked by guessing passwords.

Hmmmm….

“presidentforlife”
“kuwaitismine”
“deathtoamerica”
“killthebushes”
“disembowel”

John Gibson is reporting that Saddam’s email account was hacked by guessing passwords.

Hmmmm….

“presidentforlife”
“kuwaitismine”
“deathtoamerica”
“killthebushes”
“disembowel”

In honor of the occasion, and the Democrats’ continual innovation in electoral strategies, and with apologies to “Registered” from Free Republic, I wish to announce the premiere of a new suspense movie. Apparently, the donkeys are no longer content to merely have the dead vote–now they want to put the metabolically challenged into elected office. Of course, failing that, they’ll settle for candidates with one foot in the grave…

Jay Penn and Chuck Lindley at the Aerospace Corporation have come up with a concept that can get people into orbit for $15,000 per ticket.

I’ve worked with Jay quite a bit over the years, and those numbers actually look pretty reasonable and credible to me.

The NASA strategy for the Strategic Launch Initiative is becoming more clear.

They have recognized the folly of building a single-purpose crew rescue vehicle.

They have similarly recognized that they shouldn’t make the same mistake that they made thirty years ago, in building a single, follow-on “one-size-fits-all” space shuttle.

Unfortunately, they still seem focused on the immediate goal of getting useful value out of our multi-decabillion-dollar space station, that is currently providing little bang for the taxpayers’ buck. This is partly due to the fact that the purpose of the space station has, from its inception, ostensibly been for science, which is a difficult case to make as a justification for a program that is going to cost many tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

There is an old saying in the investment community (and even among ordinary consumers) about the folly of “throwing good money after bad.”

Like many old sayings, there’s at least a grain of truth to it.

It’s natural to want to make the best of any investment. And the greater the investment, the stronger the desire to get some utility out of it, no matter how great a white elephant it’s become.

That’s where we are with our current manned space program. The investment there is over many years, and in terms of dollars, as already described, immense and almost incomprehensible to a homeowner who has to pay a mortgage and other bills of thousands of dollars a month.

The apparent immediate goal of the Bush administration is to satisfy the international partners’ desire to get the International Space Station to the state promised to them (i.e., more than three crew members). The crew size is currently limited, at least officially, by the ability to evacuate them in an emergency, which means that they are currently restricted to the three crew that could be returned to earth via a single Soyuz module.

While they recognize that building a larger return vehicle solely for rescue purposes would be a waste of money, they’ve decided that the same vehicle might be worth building if it could play a role in replacing the costly shuttle sometime in the future.

Accordingly, they’ve redirected funds from the Space Launch Initiative, originally planned to replace the current shuttle with “shuttle II,” toward building such a crew-delivery/return replacement, that will be launched on top of an expendable rocket, despite the high cost and reliability issues of such a scheme.

But why are they doing this?

Three decades ago, the nation made a decision to build a Space Shuttle, that would ostensibly provide cheap reusable transportation to and from orbit.

Almost two decades ago, a decision was made to build a space station, using that space shuttle for the construction and support of it in operations.

All of our current civil space policy is contingent on those decisions.

In 1972, we could have made a different decision in terms of the future of the nation’s space transportation system, but we decided to build a single, one-size-fits-all launch system.

A dozen years later, because we had that launch system (though it hadn’t lived up to its original promises), the nation decided to build a space station with it.

This was the first attempt to throw good money after bad. A much more sensible approach would have been to recognize that the shuttle hadn’t turned out the way that NASA planned, in terms of flight rate, and that the better part of valor would to base a space-station design on a more cost-effective space transportation concept. But to do so would have been an admission that the Shuttle hadn’t lived up to its stated goals, and was thus a failure, which is unthinkable to any bureaucracy except under extreme duress, so this was not a politically-viable option.

Now, having built a horrendously-expensive and marginally-useful space station as a result of that decision, we are confronted with another one. Where do we go from here?

We’ve spent many tens of billions of dollars on this facility. It can support three crew (under the current, and in my opinion overly-stringent groundrules that they must all be able to evacuate to the earth at any time). To simply double that amount, we must invest many billions more, following those same groundrules.

I understand the rationale behind the current decision to build such a limited-use vehicle. We are politically constrained by our past decisions. But more importantly, we are politically constrained by our limits in vision, and our lack of any real goals in space, other than justifying decisions that have come before. That is where the concept of “throwing good money after bad” becomes applicable.

There was another way in 1972, and there is another way now. But in order to seize the day, we must answer a more fundamental question.

What are we trying to accomplish in space?

If it is to simply preserve the status quo, and maintain a minimal space jobs base in Houston and Hunstville and Florida, then the Administration is making a good decision.

If, on the other hand, the goal is to make our nation not merely pre-eminent, but to open up the new frontier and make us a true space-faring nation, one in which we can all achieve our dreams of new frontiers, then it is simply postponing the real decisions.

To do that, we must unleash the power of our country’s entrepreneurial spirit, and harness the forces of both idealism and greed that drove our ancestors across the prairies and mountains to forge a new nation.

But in order to decide which route to take, we have to have a national debate, one that we haven’t had since the late fifties. In the midst of a very real threat from fascist Islamism, it’s a difficult subject to think about, but we are on the verge of another national election in which we will select those who will be making such decisions. As always, it is not an issue on which any significant number of people will vote.

But perhaps one of the reasons is that no one ever even raises it as an issue. After all, it consumes less than a percent of the federal budget.

But until we do, we may continue to throw good money after bad.

We went on a shore dive on Thursday. It was our first dive, and we wanted to get familiar with the equipment (Patricia had a new wet suit and fins) before we went on our more serious boat dives.

The place we chose was called (uncharacteristically for Hawaii, in which almost all the place names are Hawaiian) La Perouse Bay, which was named by some Frenchman. It’s at the extreme south end of the island, well past the last resort at Wailua. It’s accessible only via a narrow, barely-paved road. In order to get to it, one must traverse an extensive field of fresh lava. Well, fresh in geological terms. It’s the remnants of the last eruption of Haleakala, over two hundred years ago.

It was a pyroclastic flow, very much like the one that is going on right now at Kilaulea on the island of Hawaii itself. It burst through the mountain and poured down the hillside to steam the sea as it cooled and expanded the acreage of the island.

As one drives along the road that’s been carved out of it, one can look up the hill and see the stark black infertile scar, all the way up to the source, where a hill was sliced in two by the molten rock.

Looking at the barren, jagged landscape on either side, Patricia remarked that it looked like someone threw up there and didn’t clean it up.

Very poetic. Think of it as the gruesome results of some vast god with a titanic bellyache, and vomit black as midnight on a new moon.

Gaia’s gut juice. Spew of Mother Earth.

Nature is not always our friend.

Spending a few days in Hawaii results, at least for me, in a mild sense of consonant deprivation. I’ll give the language this–the rules are few and simple, and once absorbed, the Hawaiian words are easily read and pronounced. While it’s perhaps very musical and flowing to separate syllables with glottal stops, it gets tiresome after a while, and one misses good old “d” and “r,” and the ambiguous but flexible “c.”

And one of the Hawaiian’s favorite consonants just barely qualifies as one, in my book. Aitch is just too soft a sound to really count. It’s really just a little puff of air.

Take the word “staccato.” Almost onomatapoetic, and one would never mistake it for an Hawaiian word–it contains three hard consonant sounds plus the beginning ess, and one can’t imagine it working with such a wimpy consonant as an aitch. But Hawaiian is such a gentle language that it’s naturally their favorite. They figure if they can’t do without consonants at all, they’re going to make the ones they have as wimpy as possible. The only Hawaiian consonant that has any force at all is the pee.

Take this word: Ha’amaea, which is the name of a harbor on the west coast of Maui (which itself has a vowel/consonant ratio of three to one). It has five vowels and only two consonants, but it still manages to wring five syllables out of them.

Why can’t we set up some kind of exchange program between the islands and the Balkans? The Hawaiians could ship all of their excess vowels to places like Bosnia, that has names like Srbenica, and take as trade the Serbian and Croation overabundance of consonants.

Both languages would be far the better for it. The Balkan folks could savor their syllables, letting them breathe with new-found gentle sounds, and perhaps, for the first time, actually be able to pronounce their children’s names.

The Hawaiians in turn could invigorate their language with not only fresh supplies of their scarce aiches, ems, ens, kays, ells and pees, but whole new frontiers in syllable separation, with the bee and the dee and the tee (not to mention the sibillant ess). They could give their glotti a break, and get more use out of their tongues.

I was thinking about this one day as we were driving along Maui’s north coast, and Patricia suggested that we go explore a little town, which she’d read about on the web, that had a vacation rental.

“What’s the name of it?”

“I don’t remember–it starts with an aitch…”

That’s helpful. We’ve now narrowed it down to about half the places on the island. I mean, the fricken state capital starts with an aitch. Hell, the name of the state itself does.

“I think it might be Hielo.”

Well, that could be an Hawaiian place name. It has the right letters in it, anyway. But I suspect that she’s thinking of the old days driving around Puerto Rico, where the gas stations and quickie marts all had signs proclaiming “HIELO,” Spanish for “ice.”

And I’m pretty sure that hielo doesn’t mean “ice” in Hawaiian. In fact, no word in Hawaiian means “ice.” The Inuit have two hundred words for it, in all its infinite glory and variety, but I doubt if the benighted Hawaiians have a single one. It’s kind of like the French and “victory.”

We dig out the map and find it. It’s “Huelo.” Close.

(A month-old post from Maui)

I’ve never been in Hawaii during election season before. They have method of campaigning that is unique and, in my opinion, dumb.

All over the island, we saw groups of people standing along the road, holding up signs with the name of their preferred candidate, smiling and waving at the traffic as it goes by.

All right, I guess it’s a cheap way of promoting name recognition (assuming that the smilers and wavers have nothing better to do with their time), but is it really an effective technique in persuading people to vote for that candidate? I can’t imagine basing my vote in any way on how many boosters of a candidate I saw along the road, or how vigorously they propelled their arms in greeting, or how pearly white their teeth were.

I don’t know how I could possibly know what the candidate’s position was on any issue I cared about, or how likely he was to keep his promises, based on how many (literally) glad handers were standing on the roadside on his behalf. And I would fear to live in a state in which the electorate was so mindless as to be influenced by such meaningless things.

I wonder if it’s a tradition from the days in which that was the main way of campaigning among the Hawaiian villagers and field workers. It may be that now, while few think that it has any positive effect, its absence might have a negative one: “Look at Johnny Hasagawa–he has no supporters willing to show their support for him.” It’s perhaps become an arms race from which no one can now back down, regardless of how pointless it is.

“Progressives” are fond of saying that only ignorant hicks and uneducated bigots could vote Republican–Democrats are more compassionate and better informed. A one-party Democratic state, in which people are apparently expected to vote based on how many poor schmucks they can get to stand on the roadside in the tropical heat and humidity, and wave and smile, would seem to belie that notion.