I agree with Jonah:
While I don’t subscribe to so-called ass-brained theories that Bin Laden never existed, I am coming around to the view that he’s dead as Michael Ledeen has suggested. I mean why wouldn’t Bin Laden issue a video for the five year anniversary of 9/11?
Hitchens says that it will get worse before it gets better (particularly because we don’t seem to be able to unite before the enemy), and it’s too early for commemorations:
The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials are erected when the war is won. At the moment, anyone who insists on the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused–not just overseas but in this country also–of making or at least of implying a “partisan” point. I debate with the “antiwar” types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been “war-weary” ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is “the war” that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not “antiwar” at all.
Steven Den Beste has related thoughts.
We can have a war on drugs (which is absolutely unwinnable) or a war against the Jihadis, but it’s nuts to think that we can have both.
Want a criticism of the Bush administration? Here’s one: the blindness of the drug warriors is appalling, and has set us back dramatically in the real war.
Michael Huang says that we need human rights in space.
Michael Huang says that we need human rights in space.
Michael Huang says that we need human rights in space.
OK, here’s where the Wolverines show whether they’re real, or not. They’ll be playing the number two team (sorry, no permalink, but it’s Notre Dame) in the nation next Saturday. They’re perennially overrated during past opening seasons, but in this one, so far, they haven’t been.
We’ll see if that motivates them. More importantly, we’ll see if it motivates Lloyd Carr, whose job may be in trouble in the same way that John Cooper‘s was…
Four-hundred-and-forty-one years ago:
The lessons for us today, almost five centuries hence, are equally important. The same enemy exists today. Instead of galleys he uses airliners, and instead of Janissaries he uses suicide bombers. He hates and fears western civilization, and seeks to convert or enslave us. We have to meet him and engage him everywhere he is, just as the Knights did. What it will take to win against him is what it took to win at Malta: preparation, skill at arms, leadership, and above all faith and an iron will.
This has truly been a long war, and no immediate end is in sight.
The entire drive up from Boca Raton to Titusville, I was listening to the radio, wondering why they were still talking about the failed ECO sensor as a potential flight issue, and hoping that they weren’t going to scrub on account of it, but if they were, I wished the entire way up, with every mile, that they would do it now, so we could stop wasting time and gas. What I couldn’t understand was what the MMT expected to change in the hours leading up to flight that would make them suddenly decide that they were going to follow the (absurd) flight rule.
They knew in the early morning hours that they had a problem. There was no reason to think that it was going to fix itself prior to launch. So if it was a violation of the launch commit criteria to fly with a failed sensor an hour before launch, why wasn’t it eight hours before launch? Why did they put the crew in the vehicle, and have them sit on their backs for hours, why did they let everyone drive from all over the place to attend the launch, if they weren’t going to fly with it?
The only possible excuse that I could come up with was that they were waiting for the best possible weather report for a next-day launch. If the weather was deteriorating for Saturday, then they might have made a last-minute decision to waive, and flown on Friday. As it turned out, the forecast for Saturday was good (and in fact better than existing conditions on Friday), so they may have decided that, since they’d have one more shot, they might as well do a tank drain, see if the problem cleared up, and do it then.
Nonetheless, it’s not the decision I’d have made. A delay of another day lost them a day of contingency at ISS, and it risked something else going wrong in the recycle. They were all ready to go on Friday, other than the failed sensor, and that shouldn’t have kept them on the ground, since the new rule was an overreaction to Columbia, anyway, and they should change it back to what it always was–fail operational (i.e, only two sensors are needed, and the other two are available for redundancy). When I was at KSC yesterday, I talked to one of the briefers in private after a status briefing, and said that they were crazy not to launch Friday. He agreed that they’ve overconstrained the system to make it almost impossible to meet scheduled objectives, and done so in a manner that makes little contribution to true safety–settling for appearances instead.
I had a long two days, but saw the launch this morning. Suffice it to say for now that I’m both amazed that they didn’t launch yesterday, and angry that they waited until an hour before liftoff to make the decision. More later.