In honor of Dan Goldin’s departure tomorrow, Keith Cowing at NASA Watch (Goldin’s long-time web nemesis) has published this link in honor of the event. Well, I got a chuckle out of it, but Bloom County generally has that effect…
All posts by Rand Simberg
Girls (and Boys) Just Wanna Have Freedom
Apparently, if we’re to go by the reaction in Kabul, while, as the old song goes, “girls just wanna have fun,” what they really want is freedom. So do boys.
Opinion Journal’s Claudia Rossett has a good follow up to Michael Ledeen’s piece yesterday on the US as fomenter of revolution. We are also (often, unfortunately, with inadequate justification as of late) still a symbol of liberty worldwide, as becomes clear whenever and whereever the boot of oppression is lifted from silent throats, and people can speak their minds and hearts.
As we wonder what lies ahead most prominently in Iraq, but also across the rest of the Islamic world, what we must keep in mind is this universal human cry. America is a land that stands for liberty, and in this we have allies–however silent they may now be–among repressed people everywhere. We can debate how best to get our message out. In waging war we need not only faith in our own values, but strategy on the ground. But in understanding what lies locked up in the tyrannies of the world, it will be important to remember the shouts in Kabul this week: “America, America!”
The images from liberated Afghanistan shows that America is much more than a place–it is still an idea–one of the most powerful ideas ever conceived–that calls to people all over the planet. I hope that we can continue to live up to the reputation, perhaps even better than we have in the past, at least the recent past. For much of the world (particularly the Muslim world), the status quo is not liberty. It’s past time for the folks at Foggy Bottom to end their mindless worship of stability, and once again orient our policy in support of the values on which this country was founded.
More Darwin Awards
Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Hofer are having trouble dredging up any sympathy for these fools. Me too.
Normally, the Darwin Award is an individual achievement, honoring that person who has eliminated him or herself from the gene pool in the stupidest possible way. I think that this year, it should be a special group award, and perhaps even retired. No one is going to ever top this bunch. Or at least, if someone does, I want to be warned if ever they come within a couple hundred miles of me.
And yes, allow them to be martyrs if they are too stupid to surrender (they must be getting down to the dregs in the virgin supply along about now), but allow a few to return to Pakistan, Arabia, Egypt, and New York to spread the word about what happens to those who throw in their lot with murdering fundamentalist monsters.
Curiouser and Curiouser
My theory that this was sabotage was complicated (but not necessarily invalidated) by the most recent findings.
According to the story in the New York Times,
The tail was torn off, leaving the attachment points, which are made of the same composite, still bolted to the plane’s metal frame, investigators said. They have not found any evidence that an explosion or contact with another object in flight caused the damage.
So much for the loose fastener theory…
Ultimate University Survival Tool
Someone clued me in to this invaluable web page. If you happen to end up with a nutty deconstructionist professor (an all-too-frequent occurrence at any post-modern university, or even small college), it will allow you to spew semiotic nonsense without having to twist your brain coming up with it yourself. The nice thing about it is that it is randomly generated, so each paper is unique, and can’t be found on the web by profs looking for plagiarists. If you need a longer paper, just run it several times and splice the outputs together via cut’n’paste. Don’t worry–doing so won’t accidentally inject any semantic content–it may even reduce it, if that’s possible. But it will read like an “A” paper in Lacanian analysis.
They’re Still At It
A few weeks ago, I asked the rhetorical question–since 911, are Democrats still calling some members of the opposite party “Taliban Republicans,” as Julian Bond did at the NAACP convention last summer?
Question answered. Apparently, according to US News and World Report:
Democratic lawmakers have adopted the language of the antiterror war to mock Republican conservatives, especially Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay.
Says a prominent Democrat: “They’re the Republican Taliban.”
I wonder how that prominent Democrat would feel if he (or she) and colleagues were called “the Stalinist wing of the Democratic party”? It would be equally odious, and equally accurate.
They’re Still At It
A few weeks ago, I asked the rhetorical question–since 911, are Democrats still calling some members of the opposite party “Taliban Republicans,” as Julian Bond did at the NAACP convention last summer?
Question answered. Apparently, according to US News and World Report:
Democratic lawmakers have adopted the language of the antiterror war to mock Republican conservatives, especially Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay.
Says a prominent Democrat: “They’re the Republican Taliban.”
I wonder how that prominent Democrat would feel if he (or she) and colleagues were called “the Stalinist wing of the Democratic party”? It would be equally odious, and equally accurate.
They’re Still At It
A few weeks ago, I asked the rhetorical question–since 911, are Democrats still calling some members of the opposite party “Taliban Republicans,” as Julian Bond did at the NAACP convention last summer?
Question answered. Apparently, according to US News and World Report:
Democratic lawmakers have adopted the language of the antiterror war to mock Republican conservatives, especially Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay.
Says a prominent Democrat: “They’re the Republican Taliban.”
I wonder how that prominent Democrat would feel if he (or she) and colleagues were called “the Stalinist wing of the Democratic party”? It would be equally odious, and equally accurate.
New NASA Administrator?
The rumor has been going around since late yesterday afternoon, but now Frank Sietzen at UPI has the story–Sean O’Keefe, currently a deputy at OMB, will be replacing Dan Goldin. O’Keefe has been intimately involved in the ISS budget mess, and given NASA’s inability to manage their programs or their budgets, they could probably do a lot worse than someone from the Office of Management and Budget. I just hope that he’ll have Administration support for the housecleaning that the agency direly needs–he unfortunately probably won’t get it from Congress.
An informed Washington source tells me that we should take any press pronouncements concerning new NASA Administrators with a healthy dose of sodium chloride, for the moment. So perhaps it’s not as done a deal as the reporting would indicate.
Well, according to Spaceref, and based on this White House Press Release, it is a done deal (assuming that the words “the President intends to nominate” imply that the nominee has accepted).
Viva la Revolution
Michael Ledeen has an excellent dose of common sense in today’s Opinion Journal, in which he points out that destroying the Islamofascists will require wholesale revolution in the Middle East, and that’s something at which Americans excel, if we can keep the pinstriped nervous nellies in Foggy Bottom from mucking it up in the name of “stability,” as they did at the end of the Gulf War.
…Yes, I know that our diplomats hate “instability,” but most Americans not only are able to cope with it, they go out of their way to create it. Stability is for those older, burnt-out countries, not for the American dynamo. And chaos is vastly preferable to the vicious tyrannical stability that has crushed and impoverished the people of Afghanistan.
Exactly. Stability is vastly overrated. The Soviet Union was stable for decades. Iraq has been a stable haven for terrorism and dictatorship for the past decade, thank you very much, State Department.
We may need to shift a few borders here and there, and topple a few corrupt regimes, but as can be seen in Afghanistan in the past couple of days, we will do it with the aid of the people of the region, and in the end, they will be much better off. To the degree that it is very messy now, that will be the result of how badly we (the West, that is, particularly Britain) botched it the first time during decolonialisation. It’s time to go back and take a “do over,” and do it right this time.