Well, apparently David Petraeus didn’t influence anyone at Time Magazine. I suspect that he influenced a lot of people in Iraq. I bet that he’ll influence voters who elect John McCain this fall, too. In fact, to think that he’s without influence requires a willing suspension of disbelief.
The Man Who Grew A Finger
I suspect that this is just the beginning of getting to the point at which we’ll be able to regenerate whole limbs.
Interestingly, Patricia had a very similar injury a few years ago when we were diving in the Dominican Republic. She had it stitched up in Santo Domingo, and the nail is there now, but the finger is just a little shorter, and still a little numb at the end. This would have been a much better solution.
Anyway, bring it on.
State Department Issues New Language Guidelines
December 15th, 1941
WASHINGTON (Routers) In an effort to drive a wedge between moderate Germans and those more extreme, the State Department issued new rules today, stipulating that the word “Nazi” was not to be used by department employees to describe the enemy. Germany recently declared war on our country, as part of its alliance with Imperial Japan, which itself attacked us at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii a little over a week ago, and with which we are now at war.
“Nazism has a great many admirable features,” said a department spokesman at Foggy Bottom, “and we want to make clear that despite the fact that the Nazi Party rules Germany, we have no quarrel with the vast majority of Nazis with peaceful intent.”
She went on to describe the National Socialist universal health care plan, its youth programs that inculcate loyalty to the government, its strict and necessary control over unbridled private industry, its wage and price controls, its strict separation of church and state, its progressive views on food purity and safety, and other beneficial features of the fascist system.
“Many of the Nazi programs have their counterparts here in President Roosevelt’s own New Deal, such as the NRA, the CCC, our price monitoring boards, and so on. In fact, many of the ideas of National Socialism were first developed in our own progressive country, and we in turn might want to consider examining their policies for more ways to improve our own.”
She went on, “…if we call Hitler and his staff, who lack moral legitimacy, ‘Nazis,’ we may unintentionally legitimize their rule, and end up offending many of the peaceful National Socialist Germans with whom we can develop a productive relationship after the defeat of the extremist Hitler regime. We don’t want to tar all Nazis with the racism and war mongering of the more fanatical members of the party.”
“We are concerned that use of the term “Nazi” to refer to the murderous extremists may glamorize their racism, give them undeserved moral authority with the German people, and undermine our ultimate war strategy of winning their hearts and minds. We want them to understand that we recognize Nazism as an ideology of peace, and welfare for the common good and betterment of all Germans. Not to mention their understandable desire for lebensraum.”
When asked what term employees were to use to refer to the enemy, she replied, “We haven’t quite worked that out yet. We’re considering ‘the Hitler gang’ for now.”
Civil Discourse
I probably shouldn’t give him benefit of the link (it will probably up his traffic by an order of magnitude or two), but apparently we’re nothing but “poo-flinging monkeys” here, because he doesn’t like to lose arguments.
Time For Space Solar Power?
There’s certainly no reason to think that much has changed based on this latest call for it:
PV technology has improved considerably since this idea was developed adding to the argument that this source of energy should be revisited. In addition, the economics of the cost of energy have changed. According to Dr. Neville Marzwell and his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Lab, an SSP system could generate energy at a cost including cost of construction of 60 to 80 cents per kilowatt-hour at the outset. He believes that “in 15 to 25 years we can lower that cost to 7 to 10 cents per kWh.” The average cost of residential electricity was 9.86 cents per kWh in the U.S. in 2006.
The problem (as always) is that this doesn’t account for the costs of competing energy sources dropping even more. And of course, the notion of building SPS with the existing space transportation infrastructure remains ludicrous. Get the costs of access down (a good idea for a lot of other reasons), and then see if it makes sense. Unfortunately, current space policy (or at least the vast amount of expenditures on space transportation) seems aimed at increasing the cost of access to space.
[Via Ken Silber]
[Early evening update]
Rand’s approach is just clearly wrong. There are no market incentives to decrease the cost of space travel, outside the COTS competition.
Nope, none at all. How will we ever do it without the government?
Oh, wait! How about the millions of people who want to take a trip, and can afford to do so if the price comes down? Mark ignores that one, though, because it doesn’t require NASA getting billions of dollars, or giving them out for a few flights via COTS, that will do very little to significantly reduce the cost of access.
First Anniversary
Henry Cate has the anniversary edition of the Carnival of Space, with an emphasis on space and television.
Doomsday Has Been Postponed
Apparently, global warming is being delayed:
Commenting on the new study, Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre said the model suggested the weakening of the MOC would have a cooling effect around the North Atlantic.
“Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades.”
Gee, what a concept.
Green Fascism
There’s an interesting post over at New Scientist on the new eugenicists. What’s even more interesting, though, are the numerous comments, which repeat many of the myths about population growth and control, and feasibility of mitigating it through space technology, including space (to use the politically incorrect word) colonization.
I don’t really have time to critique in any detail, other than to note that anyone who makes feasibility arguments on the latter subject by referring to Shuttle costs is completely clueless. Sadly though, years ago, Carl Sagan did exactly that.
New Look
Over at Keith Cowing’s place. Interestingly, it looks much less like a blog now, what with the newspaper column layout.
Superfluous
These people seem to think (nuttily enough) that there’s some kind of anti-government bias in the media, and thus a need for their web site. It’s basically your one-stop fascism shop.
[Via you know who]
Hmmmm…
Well governmentisbad.com is already taken, though it doesn’t seem to be a counterpart.
[Afternoon update]
“Government is good,” eh? Yeah, government is great:
The problems first emerged in May 2007, when 1,400 handhelds were deployed for a “dress rehearsal.” In the field, they proved to be slow and unreliable. The Bush Administration’s official explanation is that the Census Bureau didn’t get its requirements straight with the contractor, Florida-based Harris Corp. No doubt that’s true – the Government Accountability Office warned all the way back in 2005 that Census did not have a good grasp of its technology needs or effective procurement. Even so, we doubt that “slow and unreliable” were part of the original specs in March 2006.
The Census Bureau decided as long ago as 2000 that handheld computers were the future, and spent four years trying to develop one in-house, with little to show for it. That earlier failure led to the contract with Harris in 2006. As usual in government, no one in particular seems to be taking responsibility for the serial failures – which of course is part of the problem. There is little incentive for getting it right, because no one below the level of a political appointee ever loses a job for getting it wrong. You can even lose your job for getting it right if it means more efficiency.
In the case of the botched handhelds, the result is that the Census will now have to deploy some 600,000 temporary workers to go door to door and get the forms filled out by hand. The handhelds will still be used for “address canvassing,” although even at that they can’t handle more than 700 addresses at a time. For this great leap backward, taxpayers will pay $3 billion more for the census than originally estimated.
This must be one of those awful articles “biased” against the government.