War Commentary

Couldn’t Have Been Us

Remember after 911, when some of the apologists for the terrorists were saying that they couldn’t have pulled it off, because Arabs are too incompetent and dumb to do anything like that?

Well, here’s some evidence for that proposition:

The calls made on the phones allowed police to trace those behind the failed attacks last Friday, the London daily evening newspaper said, without giving sources.

The phones were meant to set off blasts when they were called, but the devices failed to detonate the mixture of gas canisters and nails in the two Mercedes cars parked in London’s entertainment district.

In a very real sense, this is no doubt part of the reason that we haven’t had more attacks, at least successful ones (remember moron Richard Reid?). The intersection of the sets between people who want to pull something like this off, and people who are capable of it, is fortunately not very large. Unfortunately, though, with advancing technology, it’s going to get easier and easier to do more and more damage.

[Update in the late afternoon]

Were they amateurish by design?

Space

Missing The Point

Jeff Brooks reprises the old arguments about relative cost and value of government programs, and whether we can afford funding for NASA, and proposes that we increase it. Well, of course we could easily afford to spend twice, or three times, or ten times as much money on NASA. We’re a very wealthy country.

But the real point is not whether the money we spend on NASA is worth it relative to other agencies, but whether or not we’re getting good value for the money. I’d argue that, if the goal is to have a robust, space-faring society, that we’ve gotten very poor value for the money to date, and simply spending more money doing the wrong things (usually because of porkified pressure from the Congress) would make matters worse, not better.

Until space actually becomes important as a goal in itself, it doesn’t matter how much money gets thrown at it. And if it were, then we could probably achieve most of what we want with the available funding, as long as it were spent more intelligently toward that goal.

War Commentary

“No Sign Of The Sacred”

Michael Yon has a gruesome report from Iraq, with graphic photos:

Soldiers from 5th IA said al Qaeda had cut the heads off the children. Had al Qaeda murdered the children in front of their parents? Maybe it had been the other way around: maybe they had murdered the parents in front of the children. Maybe they had forced the father to dig the graves of his children.

This isn’t civil war. It’s a war on the Iraqi people, and on decency itself, by a mindless, butchering hateful ideology. And in their savagery, they use our own decency against us, booby trapping bodies because they know that we, unlike they, honor the dead.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!