Natural Americans are born all over the world, but they don’t all get to live here. Michael Totten has a fascinating (and gruesome) interview with an Iraqi interpreter:
MJT: Is there a solution to the problem in this country?
Hammer: Nuke Iraq.
MJT: Be serious.
Hammer: I am serious. If you screen all Iraqis, 5 million of them would be good people. Clear them out, then kill everyone else. Syria and Iran would surrender. [Laughs.]
Right now they see 100 corpses every day in the streets. It
Somehow this kind of thing only seems to go one direction.
By way of comparison, who are the conservative reporters who are torpedoing their own careers by fabricating stories about Clinton or Reid or Pelosi? I can’t really think of any. The only conservative reporter who comes to mind is an extremely minor one by the name of Jeff Gannon whose “offense” was to ask a softball question of Bush during a press conference. If liberal reporters were similarly slimed for asking questions of an opposite nature (i.e., questions designed to make Bush look bad), we would not have a White House Press corps.
Career-ending journalistic insanity — mostly attributable to the war in Iraq — appears to be almost exclusively a phenomenon of the left. If you know of some prominent counterexamples, though, please set me straight.
Of course, just statistically, there are probably a lot more liberal reporters than conservative ones, so that might be a partial explanation. But I’m sure it’s not the whole one…
[Update in mid-afternoon]
Instapundit has a roundup of Beauchamp-related links, including this one by Don Surber, who wonders why there’s such a sellers’ market for lies on the left.
Somehow this kind of thing only seems to go one direction.
By way of comparison, who are the conservative reporters who are torpedoing their own careers by fabricating stories about Clinton or Reid or Pelosi? I can’t really think of any. The only conservative reporter who comes to mind is an extremely minor one by the name of Jeff Gannon whose “offense” was to ask a softball question of Bush during a press conference. If liberal reporters were similarly slimed for asking questions of an opposite nature (i.e., questions designed to make Bush look bad), we would not have a White House Press corps.
Career-ending journalistic insanity — mostly attributable to the war in Iraq — appears to be almost exclusively a phenomenon of the left. If you know of some prominent counterexamples, though, please set me straight.
Of course, just statistically, there are probably a lot more liberal reporters than conservative ones, so that might be a partial explanation. But I’m sure it’s not the whole one…
[Update in mid-afternoon]
Instapundit has a roundup of Beauchamp-related links, including this one by Don Surber, who wonders why there’s such a sellers’ market for lies on the left.
Somehow this kind of thing only seems to go one direction.
By way of comparison, who are the conservative reporters who are torpedoing their own careers by fabricating stories about Clinton or Reid or Pelosi? I can’t really think of any. The only conservative reporter who comes to mind is an extremely minor one by the name of Jeff Gannon whose “offense” was to ask a softball question of Bush during a press conference. If liberal reporters were similarly slimed for asking questions of an opposite nature (i.e., questions designed to make Bush look bad), we would not have a White House Press corps.
Career-ending journalistic insanity — mostly attributable to the war in Iraq — appears to be almost exclusively a phenomenon of the left. If you know of some prominent counterexamples, though, please set me straight.
Of course, just statistically, there are probably a lot more liberal reporters than conservative ones, so that might be a partial explanation. But I’m sure it’s not the whole one…
[Update in mid-afternoon]
Instapundit has a roundup of Beauchamp-related links, including this one by Don Surber, who wonders why there’s such a sellers’ market for lies on the left.
Yesterday Nader Elhefnawy explored in “Diversifying our planetary portfolio” what technologies would enable a space settlement to be self sufficient. This is an ill-posed question as he partly sees:
John Edwards is a phony. And it sounds like he’d be another Bill Clinton (who was famous for thinking that no one’s time except has had any value) when it comes to inconsideration of others:
It was well past the candidate
It’s a classic movie, and Lileks reviews it, so you don’t have to watch it.
This is a nice incremental breakthrough from a “save the planet” standpoint, but they miss out on another benefit, I think:
In laboratory tests, these new boric acid suspensions have reduced by as much as two-thirds the energy lost through friction as heat. This could result in a four or five percent reduction in fuel consumption, according to Ali Erdemir, senior scientist in Argonne
If this story is true, Orion is becoming even more Apollo-like:
Previously, the Orion was designed to land on large airbags at a landing range, although earlier hints that was no longer going to be the case came via documentation that showed a water landing – off the coast of Australia – for the Orion 3 unmanned test flight in September 2012. The first manned flight, Orion 4, was due to land at Edwards Air Force Base.
Also part of the mass saving design cycle – knocking off a total of 1,200 lbs from Orion – is the deletion of green propellants on the Crew Module, returning to the tried and tested hypergolic Reaction Control Systems (RCS). This weight savings measure was made in-line with the change to a water landing, due to salt water’s neutralizing of potential hypergolic fuel spills after splashdown.
This has many program implications. Water landing has an impact on the trade as to whether to expend or reuse the crew module. Previous trades assumed a land landing, and indicated that both life cycle and per-mission cost would be much lower for reuse, assuming a certain number of flights. But if they land in water, they may not have as much confidence in their ability to refurbish. If this means going to an expendable, they just increased the marginal flight costs quite a bit. And going to hypergolics continues to delay the day that we get propellants that are both clean, and (relatively) easy to manufacture off planet, such as methane and LOX. Of course, if they’re not going to refurbish, then at least they don’t have to worry about servicing a hypergolic system as part of turnaround, which has always been one of the ops-cost drivers for the Shuttle.
In addition, water landing means that they have to deal with a fixed-cost recovery fleet, for a low flight rate, because I don’t think they’re going to get free aircraft-carrier service, as they did in Apollo.
These are the same short-sighted types of decisions that killed the Shuttle program–pinching pennies up front with potential large increases in operational costs. And all because they chose to oversize the system, and wastespend their money building a new NASA-unique launcher that’s turning out to lack the performance they need.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I see that Chair Force Engineer and Clark Lindsey are also less than impressed.
[Update in the early afternoon]
Keith Cowing reports that PAO denies that a decision has been made. Make of that what you will…
Michael Yon has a new venue to explain Iraq, both directly to the American people, and to the media and politicians who (either ignorantly or mendaciously, or perhaps both) continue to mislead them about it being simply a civil war:
When it comes to Iraq, being there matters because of the massive disconnect between what most Americans think they know about Iraq, and what is actually going on there.
The current controversy about the extent to which Al Qaeda is a threat to peace in Iraq is a case in point. Questions about which group calling itself an offshoot of Al Qaeda is really an offshoot of Al Qaeda is a distraction masquerading as a debate.
Al Qaeda is in Iraq, intentionally inflaming sectarian hostilities, deliberately pushing for full scale civil war. They do this by launching attacks against Shia, Sunni, Kurds and coalition forces. To ensure the attacks provoke counterattacks, they make them particularly gruesome…
…Clearly, not every terrorist in Iraq is Al Qaeda, but it is Al Qaeda that has been intentionally, openly, brazenly trying to stoke a civil war. As Al Qaeda is now being chased out of regions it once held without serious challenge, their tactics are tinged with desperation.
This may be the greatest miscalculation they’ve made in their otherwise sophisticated battle for the hearts and minds of locals, and it is one we must exploit.
Whether it was in 2002 is irrelevant. Iraq is the current front line in the war. Yon knows it. The administration knows it. Even Al Qaeda repeatedly admits it.
To abandon it now will be to give the enemy a great victory, and show bin Laden to be right, that when the going gets tough, America (and the West) abandons the field. It would demonstrate that their viciousness works in accomplishing their vile goals.
And it would be all the more tragic if it happened at a time in which we are actually winning on the ground, if not in the media.