Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Probably Just Scurvy

19 Comments

So, what is the cargo of this Iranian ship headed for Somalia?

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died…

…This was also confirmed by Hassan Allore Osman, minister of minerals and oil in Puntland, an autonomous region of Somalia.

He headed a delegation sent to Eyl when news of the toxic cargo and illnesses surfaced.

He told one news publication, The Long War Journal, that during the six days he had negotiated with the pirates, a number of them had become sick and died.

“That ship is unusual,” he was quoted as saying. “It is not carrying a normal shipment.”

The pirates did reveal that they had tried to inspect the ship’s cargo containers when some of them fell sick — but the containers were locked.

Osman’s delegation spoke to the ship’s captain and its engineer by cellphone, demanding to know more about the cargo.

Initially it was claimed the cargo contained “crude oil”; later it was said to be “minerals”.

And Mwangura has added: “Our sources say it contains chemicals, dangerous chemicals.”

The symptoms described could be possibly caused by chemical weapons, but the pirates claimed that they didn’t open the locked holds (though the holds could have leaked as well). But the symptoms also match radiation poisoning.

But why would the Iranians be shipping WMD of any kind to Somalia? For transhipment elsewhere overland? And if it is radioactive, is it the material for a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb?

It will be ironic if it turns out that pirates caught what the CIA didn’t (assuming, of course, that they haven’t been tracking it).

[Late afternoon update]

Marlon McAvoy emails:

‘m a Radiation Protection tech at ORNL. Was formerly a member of the DOE’s RAP (Radiological Assistance Program) team, originally tasked and trained mostly for transport incidences, but which was reprioritized after 9-11. Just wanted to offer an observation, which might be old news to you two science geeks.

Skin burns were also reported in this incident. These are normally more associated with beta than the far more penetrating gamma radiation, but there’s no way these guys could have gotten beta burns without close exposure to actual, unshielded radioactive material. Gamma can certainly burn the skin, but in which case the victim has sustained an enormous dose and will absolutely die from it, unless the exposure was tightly collimated over a small area.

So, my guess, this seems much more likely to be of chemical rather than radiological origin. But if multiple guys did receive 500+ rem (Roentgen equivalent man) of gamma radiation, our spooks will have no difficulty determining it. We have civilian instrument packages that can map minute fluctuations in background radiation levels; a poorly shielded gamma WMD would look like a magnesium flare to whatever is used by the intelligence community.

Whether they can or should let us civvies know is, of course, another question.

It is indeed.

Political Commentary, Space and Campaign 2008

Well, That’s New

1 Comment

At least the first time I’ve heard it.

McCain just called for an end to cost-plus contracts in the debate.

I don’t know if they can be eliminated, but they should sure be cut way back. But good luck with that.

I have to say that so far, McCain is not doing very well. He’s letting Obama get away with a lot of lies and sophistry, calling him on very little of it.

[Update on Saturday afternoon]

I’m pretty sure that this is the first time that cost-plus contracting has come up in a presidential debate. It was really quite bizarre. I can’t imagine that it’s an issue on which the election will turn, and I suspect that 90%+ of the listeners had no idea what he was talking about. I’m not even sure that I know what he is talking about (in terms of what the basis of his objection is, and what specific examples in his experience prompted this strange utterance). I doubt that it had much to do with NASA, though–I’m sure that he was thinking of Pentagon contracts, where much larger budgets are at stake, and there have been some recent notable expensive procurement failures.

The good thing is that it’s clearly something that he takes seriously, and may try to do something about as president. But I suspect that it would require either an overhaul of A109, or at least a major reinterpretation of it by whoever the new SecDef, NASA administrator, and OMB directors are (not to mention GAO). It would constitute an unimaginably major cultural change in the federal procurement community, in a culture that has developed over several decades.

Which is why I first said, “good luck with that.”

[Sunday afternoon update]

Based on some comments, I have a follow-up post to this one.

Political Commentary, Space and Campaign 2008

Well, That’s New

40 Comments

At least the first time I’ve heard it.

McCain just called for an end to cost-plus contracts in the debate.

I don’t know if they can be eliminated, but they should sure be cut way back. But good luck with that.

I have to say that so far, McCain is not doing very well. He’s letting Obama get away with a lot of lies and sophistry, calling him on very little of it.

[Update on Saturday afternoon]

I’m pretty sure that this is the first time that cost-plus contracting has come up in a presidential debate. It was really quite bizarre. I can’t imagine that it’s an issue on which the election will turn, and I suspect that 90%+ of the listeners had no idea what he was talking about. I’m not even sure that I know what he is talking about (in terms of what the basis of his objection is, and what specific examples in his experience prompted this strange utterance). I doubt that it had much to do with NASA, though–I’m sure that he was thinking of Pentagon contracts, where much larger budgets are at stake, and there have been some recent notable expensive procurement failures.

The good thing is that it’s clearly something that he takes seriously, and may try to do something about as president. But I suspect that it would require either an overhaul of A109, or at least a major reinterpretation of it by whoever the new SecDef, NASA administrator, and OMB directors are (not to mention GAO). It would constitute an unimaginably major cultural change in the federal procurement community, in a culture that has developed over several decades.

Which is why I first said, “good luck with that.”

[Sunday afternoon update]

Based on some comments, I have a follow-up post to this one.

Political Commentary

Obama And Gun Rights

3 Comments

Jonathan Gewirtz has some thoughts:

If Obama supported gun rights, many pro-gun people, even Republicans, would support him, because many pro-gun people are single-issue voters on this topic and Obama’s opponent has a spotty record on gun rights. (The NRA and pro-gun rights voters have supported pro-gun Democrats in many elections.) Also, if Obama really supported the right to arms, it’s likely that many additional Republican, libertarian and independent voters would support him because conservatives and libertarians often interpret a politician’s support for the right to arms as a reliable proxy for that politician’s support of other individual rights. This point seems especially strong now, since many Republican voters distrust Obama’s opponent on free speech, business regulation and other big-govt-vs-individual-rights issues.

So on the one hand we have single-issue pro-gun people opposing Obama on guns, and on the other hand we have people who are primarily Obama partisans, not gun people, arguing that pro-gun people should trust Obama on guns. Who should we believe?

I know who I believe.

I’d also point out that this is one more area (like being post racial, and moderate) where the real Obama is being airbrushed by his supporters to appear to be something he is not.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A History Of Thuggery

1 Comment

Patterico has the story:

…the DNC threatened Sinclair Broadcasting’s broadcast license over an anti-Kerry documentary called ‘Stolen Honor.’ Kerry spokesthug Chad Clanton was quoted as saying: ‘I think they’re going to regret doing this, and they better hope we don’t win.’ He hastened to add that it wasn’t a threat.”

Do you Obamaphiles really want these people in charge of the Justice Department? That doesn’t scare you just a little bit?

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Gas Lines

15 Comments

I keep hearing about shortages and lines in the south. The last time we had gas lines on any major scale was in the seventies, when oil prices were kept artificially low by federal fiat. Is that what’s happening here? Are the “anti-gouging” laws keeping prices too low, and discouraging new supply? For instance, if you can’t get any more for it in North Carolina than you can in Ohio, where’s the incentive to spend the money to ship it in from there?

Can anyone in the areas where the lines are tell me?

Political Commentary

Anything Is Possible, I Guess

7 Comments

Is Bill Clinton actually concerned about the country?

…we must remember that Clinton is a centrist (like Bush and, even more, McCain). No one knows, perhaps even Obama himself, what Obama is. Maybe, like many of us, Bill Clinton is genuinely worried. He would know, wouldn’t he?

People will look back on this year as they did 1972, and wonder how Obama got the nomination, and why the superdelegates didn’t do their jobs.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

So What’s Stopping Her?

23 Comments

Nancy Pelosi says that the bailout bill has to pass.

OK, Madame Speaker, if you believe that, if it’s such a great idea, then why not pass it? Your party controls the House. There is no filibuster as there is in the Senate. There’s nothing the House Republicans can do to stop you. So where is the bill?

Obviously, she just wants keister upholstery in case it doesn’t work. She wants to get buy-in from the Republicans so that they can share the blame for the taxpayer ripoff. I don’t see why they should give it to her. And I also don’t see why this isn’t pointed out in news stories like this.

Oh, right.