Confederate Yankee asks the AP. I suspect they’ll ignore the question.
Why Do They Torment Us?
Lileks has thoughts on the never-ending attempts of the fops in Paris to foist retro fashions on us. It will probably go on until the last baby boomer has retired from the fashion industry (including fashion sections of newspapers).
Also, this:
In related fashion news: on this day in 1946, the bikini was introduced, a swmsuit named after an atomized Pacific atoll. Good thing they didn
“Flight School” Report
Leonard David has a useful report on Esther Dyson’s recent conference on personal spaceflight and personal jet flight.
I have to say that she certainly has jumped into this with both feet.
And this was an interesting comment from Virgin Galactic COO Alex Tai:
Tai said he’s looking for that “Netscape moment” when the public space travel business rockets to stardom – just like the internet browser did when it kicked-started the dotcom boom of the mid-1990s.
“We have taken in $25 million from an interest of 80,000 people…with our tiny sales force,” Tai told SPACE.com. “There’s a huge appetite for this offering once we get out there…once we prove that it’s something that’s going to be safe, really fun to do, and is repeatable. What will happen then is that, suddenly, everyone will see Virgin Galactic making an awful lot of money. And that is the next ‘go’ moment.”
Tai speculated that when Richard Branson decides to fund his next big venture, and he sells 10 percent of Virgin Galactic for $100 million, people will hunger to be part of the public space travel business.
“But at the moment, these guys don’t want to invest because there hasn’t been that Netscape moment,” Tai continued. “It is being held up because Virgin Galactic is the gorilla in the room. Who is going to take Virgin on? That’s a shame because I believe it’s a massive market. I would much rather there’s competition getting ready now,” Tai concluded.
Yes, a smart businessman recognizes that competition is necessary for a healthy industry, particularly when it’s first getting off the ground (in this case, literally).
“Flight School” Report
Leonard David has a useful report on Esther Dyson’s recent conference on personal spaceflight and personal jet flight.
I have to say that she certainly has jumped into this with both feet.
And this was an interesting comment from Virgin Galactic COO Alex Tai:
Tai said he’s looking for that “Netscape moment” when the public space travel business rockets to stardom – just like the internet browser did when it kicked-started the dotcom boom of the mid-1990s.
“We have taken in $25 million from an interest of 80,000 people…with our tiny sales force,” Tai told SPACE.com. “There’s a huge appetite for this offering once we get out there…once we prove that it’s something that’s going to be safe, really fun to do, and is repeatable. What will happen then is that, suddenly, everyone will see Virgin Galactic making an awful lot of money. And that is the next ‘go’ moment.”
Tai speculated that when Richard Branson decides to fund his next big venture, and he sells 10 percent of Virgin Galactic for $100 million, people will hunger to be part of the public space travel business.
“But at the moment, these guys don’t want to invest because there hasn’t been that Netscape moment,” Tai continued. “It is being held up because Virgin Galactic is the gorilla in the room. Who is going to take Virgin on? That’s a shame because I believe it’s a massive market. I would much rather there’s competition getting ready now,” Tai concluded.
Yes, a smart businessman recognizes that competition is necessary for a healthy industry, particularly when it’s first getting off the ground (in this case, literally).
“Flight School” Report
Leonard David has a useful report on Esther Dyson’s recent conference on personal spaceflight and personal jet flight.
I have to say that she certainly has jumped into this with both feet.
And this was an interesting comment from Virgin Galactic COO Alex Tai:
Tai said he’s looking for that “Netscape moment” when the public space travel business rockets to stardom – just like the internet browser did when it kicked-started the dotcom boom of the mid-1990s.
“We have taken in $25 million from an interest of 80,000 people…with our tiny sales force,” Tai told SPACE.com. “There’s a huge appetite for this offering once we get out there…once we prove that it’s something that’s going to be safe, really fun to do, and is repeatable. What will happen then is that, suddenly, everyone will see Virgin Galactic making an awful lot of money. And that is the next ‘go’ moment.”
Tai speculated that when Richard Branson decides to fund his next big venture, and he sells 10 percent of Virgin Galactic for $100 million, people will hunger to be part of the public space travel business.
“But at the moment, these guys don’t want to invest because there hasn’t been that Netscape moment,” Tai continued. “It is being held up because Virgin Galactic is the gorilla in the room. Who is going to take Virgin on? That’s a shame because I believe it’s a massive market. I would much rather there’s competition getting ready now,” Tai concluded.
Yes, a smart businessman recognizes that competition is necessary for a healthy industry, particularly when it’s first getting off the ground (in this case, literally).
Science And “Scientism”
An interesting dust up between Leon Kass and Steven Pinker on the nature of the mind, and morality.
I think that, as is often the case in debates like this, that they are talking past each other, which is almost inevitable, given that they start with such profoundly different premises.
[Update early afternoon]
John Derbyshire (from whom I got the link) has further thoughts. I’m a little surprised that he’s surprised that Kass can have a nasty side, though.
[Update an hour or so later]
He also has some cogitations about consciousness.
Science And “Scientism”
An interesting dust up between Leon Kass and Steven Pinker on the nature of the mind, and morality.
I think that, as is often the case in debates like this, that they are talking past each other, which is almost inevitable, given that they start with such profoundly different premises.
[Update early afternoon]
John Derbyshire (from whom I got the link) has further thoughts. I’m a little surprised that he’s surprised that Kass can have a nasty side, though.
[Update an hour or so later]
He also has some cogitations about consciousness.
Science And “Scientism”
An interesting dust up between Leon Kass and Steven Pinker on the nature of the mind, and morality.
I think that, as is often the case in debates like this, that they are talking past each other, which is almost inevitable, given that they start with such profoundly different premises.
[Update early afternoon]
John Derbyshire (from whom I got the link) has further thoughts. I’m a little surprised that he’s surprised that Kass can have a nasty side, though.
[Update an hour or so later]
He also has some cogitations about consciousness.
Right At Home
You know, if true, there’s something poetically just, almost allegorical about this:
Editorial staffers on the third and fourth floors of the paper’s new Eighth Avenue building are gagging on the smell of dead mice trapped in the vents, an insider tells us. Now, the ad sales department is desperately trying to avoid a similarly stinky situation as vermin run through their offices.
Funny, usually rats flee sinking ships.
Overrated
Many people have expressed surprise that doctors were involved in Jihad. Beyond that, there seems to be some shock that they did so in such an incompetent manner. They’re doctors! They’re supposed to be smart, right?
Well, with all due respect to my physician readers and commenters, I’ve never bought into that myth. Neither does John Derbyshire:
I attended a British university with a large and famous teaching hospital attached. The medical students were pretty widely regarded as the dumbest on campus, and as the heaviest drinkers and stupidest pranksters. Of the five or six student rock groups, the medics’ was the loudest and worst. (Its name was “Perry Stalsis and his Abdo Men.”) My subsequent experience of doctors has done nothing to erase those early impressions. Sure, medical students have to memorize the names of a lot of little parts. So do auto mechanics.
That’s how I’ve always viewed doctors–as mechanics, except for the human body, rather than inanimate objects.
Not saying, of course, that there aren’t smart doctors, or doctors capable of rigging and detonating explosives via cell phone (but as I’ve noted in the past, fortunately, people competent at doing such things are generally less likely to want to). But there’s certainly no reason to automatically infer high intelligence, or even competence, just because someone is a doctor. Or a lawyer, for that matter.
By the way, it would also be nice if this latest development finally puts to bed the ongoing “progressive” myth that terrorism is caused by poverty and alienation, or by our foreign policy (the latest manifestation of this nonsense is the nutty notion that we are “creating terrorists in Iraq”).
It’s the Jihad, stupid. As a former Islamist notes, we are at war with an ideology:
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy…
…And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4’s Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: ‘What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.’
He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.
I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I’d be laughing once again. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombings, and I were both part of the BJN – I met him on two occasions – and though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.
We continue to deny moral agency to Muslims, and act as though we really are responsible for all bad things in the world, and they have no responsibility for their own behavior. If we don’t understand what we are at war with, and chase after solutions to problems that don’t really exist, and continue to foolishly ask questions like “why do they hate us?”, we can never win.
[Friday morning update]
Diane West has more:
In the media, the effort [to ignore the Islamist elephant in the corner] is misleading to the point of farce. Joel Mowbray, writing at the Powerline blog, noted that the New York Times has identified Britain’s Muslim terrorists as “South Asian people”