Space

On The Edge Of Our Seats

COTS finalists are supposed to be announced in a couple hours.

Clark Lindsey has an overview of the program, and links (including one to the webcast of the announcement, which will occur at 4 PM Eastern).

[Update shortly after begin of announcement]

Just said that two have been selected. So we know they’re not going to be spreading money thin.

Well, that didn’t take long. SpaceX and RpK.

That means two (partially) reusable vehicle companies.

[Update a minutes later]

Well, I see via comments that I didn’t have to liveblog it. An army of reporters!

Economics

Heading South?

Has the oil fever finally peaked?

…the recent record-high prices have fueled a boom in exploration. And as that boom begins to yield more oil, the industry will gain a greater ability to ramp up production in one place in order to make up for any shortfall elsewhere.

This should reduce the impact of a supply disruption in, say, Iran or Nigeria, and ease what experts refer to as the security premium that’s currently build into oil prices.

“That [premium] is in the neighborhood of $25 dollars a barrel,” said James Williams, an energy economist at the consultancy WTRG Economics. “That number would go away, or most of it would go away, if we had more spare production capacity.”

And that’s not even considering shale and the tar sands, which are now coming on line, and will remain that way, as long as prices don’t drop back into the twenties.

Science And Society

Genocide, Not Ecocide

Environmentalists (most notably, recently, Jared Diamond) are fond of using Easter Island as a cautionary tale of what happens when resources are depleted in a non-renewable manner. Well, it’s looking a lot like this example is a fairy tale:

By the time the second round of radiocarbon results arrived in the fall of 2005, a complete picture of Rapa Nui’s prehistory was falling into place. The first settlers arrived from other Polynesian islands around 1200 A.D. Their numbers grew quickly, perhaps at about three percent annually, which would be similar to the rapid growth shown to have taken place elsewhere in the Pacific. On Pitcairn Island, for example, the population increased by about 3.4 percent per year following the appearance of the Bounty mutineers in 1790. For Rapa Nui, three percent annual growth would mean that a colonizing population of 50 would have grown to more than a thousand in about a century. The rat population would have exploded even more quickly, and the combination of humans cutting down trees and rats eating the seeds would have led to rapid deforestation. Thus, in my view, there was no extended period during which the human population lived in some sort of idyllic balance with the fragile environment.

It also appears that the islanders began building moai and ahu soon after reaching the island. The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island’s trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued.

I’m sure that the argument now will be that they were about to collapse any year now, but the evil white men killed them before they had a chance to.

War Commentary

Having It Both Ways?

1 Comment

Andy McCarthy points out the cognitive dissonance of the ACLU and New York Times:

…which is it? Is the TSP leak a big nothing that changed no one’s behavior, or a bombshell that changed everyone’s behavior? Evidently, it depends on which scenario the Left believes will damage the Bush administration more on any given day.

War Commentary

Need A Knock-Out Blow

Here’s an interesting article on the history of Israeli military conflicts, and why they lost (or at least didn’t win, making another inevitable soon) this one.

I’m too busy to post much on this right now, but this leads to a much bigger theme. One of the damaging things that the UN has done over the decades is to short-circuit many conflicts, causing them to actually go on unabated for years, albeit at a lower level with flareups, because its emphasis and urgency is always on band-aid ceasefires and halting fighting, rather than achieving true peace or justice.

Education

Ethnic Cleansing

By Arabs:

Arabism flies in the face of historical fact. Ethnic minorities in Lebanon, as throughout the Middle East, have suffered at the hands of Arabs since the Arab-Islamic invasions in the early Muslim period. Of the efforts of Arab regimes and their ideological supporters in the West to de-legitimize regional identities other than Arab, Walid Phares, a well-known professor of Middle East studies, has written: “[The] denial of identity of millions of indigenous non-Arab nations can be equated to an organized ethnic cleansing on a politico-cultural level.” This tradition of culturally suppressing minorities is the wellspring of the linguistic imperialism regnant at Middlebury’s Arabic Summer School.

Yet healthier models for language instruction are easy to find. In the Anglophone world, Americans, Irish, Scots, New Zealanders, Australians, Nigerians, Kenyans, and others are native English-speakers, but not English. Can anyone imagine an English language class in which students are assumed to be Anglican cricket fans who sing “Rule Britannia,” post maps showing Her Majesty’s empire at its pre-war height, and prefer shepherd’s pie and mushy peas? Yet according to the hyper-nationalists who run Middlebury’s Arabic language programs, all speakers of Arabic are Arabs–case closed.

A leading Arabic language program shouldn’t imbue language instruction with political philosophy. It should instead concentrate on teaching a difficult language well–on promoting linguistic ability, not ideological conformity. Academics should never intellectualize their politics and then peddle them to students under the guise of scholarship. Those who do may force a temporary dhimmitude on their student subjects, but in the end they only marginalize their field and themselves.

This is, in some ways, even more egregious than that loon up at Wisconsin who wanted to teach 9/11 conspiracy theories in a class on Islam, because it’s actually much more insidious.

[Via Jonah Goldberg, who also writes today about the Swastika and the Scimitar]

President Bush undoubtedly didn

War Commentary

Finally Waking Up?

Victor Davis Hanson writes that there is some hope amid the current gloom in the Middle East:

…all is not lost, since lunacy cuts both ways. Iran and Syria unleashed Hezbollah because they were both facing global scrutiny, one over nuclear acquisition and the other over the assassination of Lebanese reformer Rafik Hariri. Those problems won

War Commentary

Don’t Know Much About History

The New York Times thinks that the administration is “rewriting the Geneva Convention,” when in fact it’s the New York Times that is engaging in revisionism.

Mark Danziger explains the historical foolishness of the argument that it’s important for us to abide by Geneva so that our enemies will. In fact, when we grant Geneva rights to people who have no rules at all, we weaken the Conventions, and strip them of meaning. There are good reasons to treat Jihadi prisoners humanely, in general, but Geneva is a very misguided and in fact counterproductive one. And as a commenter points out, it’s only possible to make the argument that the Times does if one has never actually read the Conventions.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!