Our favorite homeless mullah says that they’re just waiting for a shipment of anti-aircraft missiles, and then they’ll chase the infidels out. There was no discussion as to whether or not he was still living in his car. Maybe it’s been repossessed.

If this happens, I’ll know that the Administration is serious about fixing our intelligence problems.

Robert Musil is appropriately brutal on Senator Jim “Benedict Arnold” Jeffords’ recent bout of megalomania.

A guy in California has actually patented a phaser that can stun from a distance. The UK defence forces are interested.

[Update at 2:57 PM PDT]

I should add, that I don’t think it will work. The ability to transmit a charge through such a “tunnel” has been demonstrated, but I think that it’s unlikely that it would reliably “stun” an individual. It would need a lot of power, which means a heavy battery pack, and even then, the effects on human physiology would be unpredictable. It might render him unconscious, it might kill him, it might make him mad. Life’s not like the movies…

A guy in California has actually patented a phaser that can stun from a distance. The UK defence forces are interested.

[Update at 2:57 PM PDT]

I should add, that I don’t think it will work. The ability to transmit a charge through such a “tunnel” has been demonstrated, but I think that it’s unlikely that it would reliably “stun” an individual. It would need a lot of power, which means a heavy battery pack, and even then, the effects on human physiology would be unpredictable. It might render him unconscious, it might kill him, it might make him mad. Life’s not like the movies…

A guy in California has actually patented a phaser that can stun from a distance. The UK defence forces are interested.

[Update at 2:57 PM PDT]

I should add, that I don’t think it will work. The ability to transmit a charge through such a “tunnel” has been demonstrated, but I think that it’s unlikely that it would reliably “stun” an individual. It would need a lot of power, which means a heavy battery pack, and even then, the effects on human physiology would be unpredictable. It might render him unconscious, it might kill him, it might make him mad. Life’s not like the movies…

Do debating tactics get any more confused, sleazy and odious than this?

A slave owner in the antebellum South thought that blacks were not human beings, and he resented like hell an abolitionist telling him that he had to treat a black like a human being, and it was his principled view that that wasn’t the case. And you had to fight a civil war and basically use the state to enforce the notion that all men are created equal, and that blacks were as fully human beings as whites were. So there are times that that libertarian model just doesn’t work very well.

So, Fukuyama claims that libertarianism, a belief in the sovereignty of the individual, would have defended slavery? Francis, get a clue. Slavery was a failure of statism–in which laws were passed that made it legal for one man to enslave another. This was as far from libertarianism as it’s possible to get.

Comments like this make it hard to take anything he says about ethics or morality, on the subject of cloning, or anything else, seriously.

I’m not normally really big on labor actions, but I hope that the airline pilots strike over this stupidity. My only consolation is that it would probably be even worse if Gore were president.

Until DNS catches up over the next few days, the URL for Instapundit is here.

I’ve long complained that NASA’s efforts to reduce costs were misdirected, because their focus was on technology (which is a problem, but not a major one) rather than new markets and financing (which is the problem). We’ve long known that many people would go into space if they could afford it–polls have always shown it–but NASA has steadfastly ignored this, instead always perverting every launch study they do into a replacement for the Shuttle–oversized, and underflown (the most recent example being X-33, though the SLI program shows signs of the same debilitating tendency).

They have spent (and in most cases, wasted) billions of dollars on this, when a tiny fraction of a percent of the funds that they’ve spent on these technology efforts could have funded some serious market polling that vehicle developers and investors could literally take to the bank.

Finally, after many years, a mere trickle of the NASA new-vehicle funding (this time out of the Space Launch Initiative) has gone toward this end, which will have value far beyond the billions previously spent on technology and system studies.

A NASA contractor, Futron, has directed Zogby International to do a poll, using funding from their market-analysis contract with NASA. Unlike previous polls, which queried the general public, this one focused on people with the actual means to go.

The unsurprising (to me) result is that rich folks are like any other–half of them want to go, and are willing to pay what it costs. Mark Shuttleworth isn’t a weirdo–he’s typical. Of course, the way in which the rich folks aren’t like you and me is that they can afford to.

To me, this is one of the most exciting things that’s happened in space in a long time (partly because I’ve been advocating it for many years). It will go a long way toward making investors take this market more seriously, the previous lack of which has been holding us back. The frustrating thing, of course, is that it could have been done any time over the past couple decades, had we had more visionary people running the agency.