Matt Welch’s new book on John McCain
Under Distant Stars
Michael Yon writes about the state of medical support in the war, which is surely the best in any war, any time in history. But he also writes about some things that never change:
The soldier who had been ambushed by the IED in Iraq was expected to die very soon. I was a few feet away when a call came in from a close family member. The family member did not inquire about his condition or what happened. This family member only wanted to know when the soldier would die, and who would receive his death benefit. In less civilized times, people like that roamed the battlefield with tools to pry gold teeth from the jaws of fallen soldiers, but it was distressing to imagine that a family member would do the same.
Yes, distressing, but sadly, not surprising, for anyone who watches the freak shows on daytime television.
Scientific Cascades
I’ve been skeptical about the link between dietary fat, and weight and poor health for a long time (at least since I first read Barry Sears’ analyses
It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn
Getting Down And Regolithy
Ken Murphy has a first-hand report from the recent Lunar Exploration and Analysis Group Conference in Houston.
Will History Repeat?
Let’s hope so.
The Democrats, meanwhile, held a convention in late August, nominating without serious controversy George B. McClellan, the general whom Lincoln had dismissed as head of the Union forces in Virginia because he would not fight. The Democratic platform denounced “four years of failure” in the war effort and the destruction of “public liberty and private right.” It called for the restoration of the rights of the states unimpaired, and a settlement of the issues central to the war
Media Dishonesty Matters
Indeed it does.
I knew that there was a lot of journalistic fraud out there, but I hadn’t realized the extent. And of course, one of the biggest frauds is Dan Rather.
The New Poor
Mark Steyn, on the Democrats’ stealth nationalization of “health care” and their cynical use and abuse of children:
The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game. As it is, the Dems do enough cynical and opportunist hiding behind biography and identity, and it’s incredibly tedious. And anytime I send my seven-year-old out to argue policy you’re welcome to clobber him, too. The alternative is a world in which genuine debate is ended and, as happened with Master Frost, politics dwindles down to professional staffers writing scripts to be mouthed by Equity moppets.
…So executive vice-presidents’ families are now the new new poor? I support lower taxes for the Frosts, increased child credits for the Frosts, an end to the “death tax” and other encroachments on transgenerational wealth transfer, and even severe catastrophic medical-emergency aid of one form or other. But there is no reason to put more and more middle-class families on the government teat, and doing so is deeply corrosive of liberty.
And, if the Democrats don’t like me saying that, next time put up someone in long pants to make your case.
Emergent Properties
I was watching television tonight, on one of my new HD channels on DirecTV (no, I didn’t get paid for that, but I wish I had). If you want to understand this concept, and unintended consequences, go no further than to watch The Producers (either version
They deliberately picked the worst play, the worst playwright, the worst director, the worst cast, and it turned into a hit. And things like that can happen all the time.
[Morning update]
Sorry some found this post cryptic. Let me rewrite. I was watching “The Producers” (movie version of the musical) last night, on one of the new DirecTV HD channels (a fact that was incidental to the real point, which was that I was watching The Producers). The unintended, and undesired success of their musical was an emergent property of their attempts to make it a failure, by choosing the worst of everything, which somehow resulted in a hit. I was not slamming HD–I was plugging DirecTV for being the first to offer a large number of HD channels.
Fedora Problem Update
OK, so I determined that both Ubuntu and Fedora Core 7 (rescue CD) could see my network cards. Ubuntu could see the one on the mother board, and Fedora Core 7 could see both. But Ubuntu couldn’t connect to my network via DHCP.
So I decided to use Fedora. But when I tried to download via http, it demanded a domain and a folder on that domain. When I input both, it insisted on inputting double slashes between domain and folder, even when I deleted them from both ends, so naturally, the repository couldn’t be found.
So I decided to download the Live CD. When I did so, it turned out to be larger than 700 meg, which meant that I couldn’t burn it on to a CD–I had to use a DVD. If I’d know that, I would have simply downloaded the entire DVD iso.
The problem is, I’ve never burned a DVD (though I have a DVD burner) so that means that I have to go out to wherever, and buy blank DVDs. Why couldn’t Fedora put a Live install on a CD? It wouldn’t have been much smaller…
[Update a few minutes later]
I should add that I suspect that my earlier problems were due to attempting to install a 32-bit version of the OS on an AMD 64 chip. So perhaps a solution is to burn a 64-bit version of Core 6…
Who Will Carry The Fusion Torch?
I can’t find any web confirmation of this on a quick search, but I am reliably informed that Bob Bussard died yesterday. I didn’t know that he was ill. I may have more thoughts later.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This isn’t my (direct) source, but this is the news from Jerry Pournelle.
[Tuesday morning update]
Well, there are certainly a lot of encomia in comments. I didn’t really know the man, myself. I met him once, a quarter of a century ago, at a monthly OASIS meeting in LA, where he gave a talk on his “fusion lightbulb” concept, and several of us had dinner with him afterward. Prior to that, I had only known him as the man after whom the interstellar ramjet was (appropriately, since he invented the concept) named. My brief experience matches that of commenters, though. He was an interesting, friendly man, who seemed to be attempting to accomplish great things for humanity.
And it’s sad that people don’t realize what humanitarians technologists can be. Most people think that humanitarians are only social-worker types. But whatever you think of him personally, Henry Ford revolutionized America, and gave mobility to the masses. Edison brought them light. Sam Walton (who was not a technologist, but a businessman), for all of the unfair demonization of his store chain, has helped the poor more than any social program, by making relatively high-quality (by the standards of a century ago) goods much more affordable to them.
More humanitarian technologists should be recognized as Norman Borlaug was. Perhaps, if polywell fusion pans out (and I have no opinion on the probability of that), Dr. Bussard will be as well, but it will be a shame that if so, it will be posthumously.