I’ve got mixed feelings about a couple pr0n spams I received this morning, subject: “Liberated Arab Women.”

On the one hand, they do indicate some level of progress toward liberalizing the Middle East, a state that’s to be highly desired, and in fact necessary before we can consider the war on “terror” over and won.

On the other hand, is this really the kind of “liberation” that Arab women were seeking?

[Update a few minutes later]

Just coincidentally, Johah Goldberg has some related thoughts on affirmative action in the pr0n industry.

Jane Galt has an explanation of market bubbles from an evolutionary-psychology perspective. Well worth reading.

It’s looking more and more like a replay of Kristallnacht in Europe.

Rocketman explains. I find little with which to disagree except, like Mitchell Burnside Clapp of Pioneer Rocketplane, I’d like to dispense with the phrase “reusable launch vehicle” (one that has many misleading connotations) and call them space transports.

Also, go check out Jeff Foust’s interesting first-hand report on the SpaceX rollout in Washington.

For those who are worried that the Chinese are going to beat us in the space race, let it be known that they can’t even launch a woman. They’ll never catch up with politically correct NASA.

Airbus made a dumb bet. It thought that what the world’s airlines wanted was bigger airplanes. What they’d really like, of course, is economic supersonic aircraft, but none (or, should I say, neither?) of the major aircraft manufacturers understand the problem well enough to go after that market.

Now, it turns out that, for some strange reason, their customers (and their customers’ customers, the actual passengers) didn’t want airplanes that took a humungous amount of time to board and unboard, and wouldn’t fit in many of the existing terminal gates. Not to mention how attractive a target a 900-passenger aircraft would be to a terrorist…

Somehow, while Boeing hasn’t been impressive in the commercial air industry as of late, I don’t think that they would have made a marketing blunder like this, if for no other reason than, well…they haven’t. They’ve been looking into more economical smaller planes instead (though they still don’t understand the supersonic issues). Only a quasi-government aircraft company like Airbus could get way with a dumb decision like this one, and I suspect that they’ll be bailed out of any negative consequences.

Sixty-two years ago.

[Evening update]

Laughing Wolf expands on the subject (not difficult, given my brevity).

John Kerry, his misbegotten campaign in an uncontrollable tailspin, is getting very frustrated.

Howard Lovy says those damned technologists are scaring the children again. This latest schtick of his reminds me of an old Bob Newhart routine.

Clark Lindsey has a lot of good stuff today over at RLV news, including SpaceShipOne’s first in-flight test of their rocket engine, the SpaceX extravaganza in Washington, and some promising developments by the Japanese (perhaps I was a little too hasty in dissing them–we’ll see if they allow this effort to flower).

I do want to clarify one point, though.

…I’m sure that Elon would agree with Rand Simberg and others who say that man-rating is an obsolete term. All vehicles should be built to the highest degree to not fail, regardless of whether the payload includes people or not.

To be precise, all reusable vehicles should be built to the highest degree not to fail. Optimal reliability for an expendable is an economic trade based on payload value and insurance rates, so it may still make sense to talk about man or (to use the current PC NASA term) human rating of the Delta IV and Atlas V for OSP. It’s pretty clear, at least to me, that for a number of reasons, neither of those vehicles are going to be usable off the shelf for that mission, despite public impressions to the contrary.