Administrative

A Small Victory

Once in a while, the good guys win. I got pinged this morning (and the pings are still way, way down from what they were before I renamed scripts):

A new TrackBack ping has been sent to your weblog, on the entry 6459 (The
Big Lie Continues).

IP Address: 209.123.8.127
Title: airlines
Weblog: british

Excerpt:
british

It takes you to a page that just links to airlines.

I forwarded the notification email to the web host at prohosting.com with a hope that this was in violation of their terms of service. I just got the following email from them:

This account has been removed from our servers for violating our Acceptable Use Policy. Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.

I’m sure that the cretin will quickly find another host, but at least any time spent spamming us with that URL is now wasted.

Social Commentary

Number Two Is Number One

…at least for me. No, get your mind out of the toilet–that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the top ten irritating things that other drivers do. And hogging the left lane is much more irritating to me than someone on a cell phone. My attitude toward cell phone use is like my attitude toward drug use–if it impairs your driving, then don’t do it, but I don’t care about it intrinsically.

The Freepers have comments, and I agree with this one (slightly edited):

No.2 is the worst.

In fact. No.2 causes every single one of the other annoyances.

All of them.

The slow “safe” drivers are the most unsafe drivers around.

They are indecisive, scared, do not follow the flow, have no clue about the passing lane, and do not use their blinkers.

They cause people rage, especially because they will not get ticketed, even though they are causing the biggest problems.

Someone speeding 10 mph over the speed limit with the flow and control of a car is not a safety hazard at all.

Slow idiots with no clue are.

Political Commentary

So They Don’t Cry

The history of Soviet jokes:

Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience because the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent. By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became a joke about communism. There have been political and anti-authority jokes in every era, but nowhere else did political jokes cohere into an anonymous body of folk literature as they did under communism. With the creation of the Soviet bloc after the war, communism exposed itself to Czech and Jewish traditions of humour

Political Commentary

So They Don’t Cry

The history of Soviet jokes:

Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience because the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent. By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became a joke about communism. There have been political and anti-authority jokes in every era, but nowhere else did political jokes cohere into an anonymous body of folk literature as they did under communism. With the creation of the Soviet bloc after the war, communism exposed itself to Czech and Jewish traditions of humour

Political Commentary

So They Don’t Cry

The history of Soviet jokes:

Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience because the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent. By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became a joke about communism. There have been political and anti-authority jokes in every era, but nowhere else did political jokes cohere into an anonymous body of folk literature as they did under communism. With the creation of the Soviet bloc after the war, communism exposed itself to Czech and Jewish traditions of humour

War Commentary

He Forgot One

I agree that we’re in a new world war (and the third in a row that is a fundamental clash of ideologies), but I wish that Newt would stop calling it World War III. It’s World War IV. World War III was the Cold War. And unfortunately, this one may last almost as long.

[Update]

I should note this (a couple years old, and quite long) essay by Norman Podhoretz on this issue.

[Late morning update]

If we’re in a long world war, then it makes no sense to talk about the “war” in Iraq. It was only a battle, as was Afghanistan, as Larry Schweikart points out:

The supposed value of history is that it allows one to apply a long-term lens perspective to current events. That, however, seems to be sadly missing in the case of the War on Terror, and, especially, Iraq. Let me say from the get-go that the Bush Administration erred badly in allowing the struggle in Iraq to be labeled a “war.” It is a battle, part of the larger War on Terror. It is no more a “war” than Sicily or North Africa were “wars.” But Bush fell into the Left’s trap and allowed it to be called a “war,” and as such it has been separated from the “War on Terror,” and the “War in Afghanistan,” itself a battle.

As historians (objective ones, that is) look back 30 years from now, and write the history of this war, they will find the battle of Iraq essentially was over after November 2004. I do not say that because Bush won reelection–that was critical, but so was the formation of the Iraqi government at that time–but because those two events then allowed a military victory at Fallujah, which was the tipping point of this battle (or, if you prefer, “war”). At Fallujah, more than 2000 terrorists were killed and the real al-Qaeda back of the so-called “insurgency” broken. Since then, Zarqawi was scrambling, as did the Japanese after Okinawa, to re-stock his ranks of suicide bombers. They were both unsuccessful. Last month, Zarqawi was killed, replicating the shooting down of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plane in 1943. Even then, the war in the Pacific was not over–and the bloodiest battles had not been fought–but again, the outcome was further cemented.

And he’s optimistic that we’re going to ultimately win. I hope he’s right.

Space

Synergy

Alan Boyle has scored a long and interesting interview with Bob Bigelow (yeah, I know it’s old news–I’ve been busy for the last few days), in which, among many other things, he discusses the prospects for American commercial launch providers for his needs:

Looking ahead, Bigelow plans two launches per year, moving up from the third-scale Genesis to a roughly half-scale prototype, and finally launching the full-scale, 330-cubic-meter Nautilus spacecraft by 2012. The time line targets 2015 for an honest-to-goodness space station, capable of hosting tourists or researchers, performers or athletes.

Bigelow hopes that the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be ready to go in time for the Nautilus launches. If SpaceX founder Elon Musk is successful, “we are probably a multiple-flight customer for him,” Bigelow said.

But read the whole thing.

And I hope that I’ll get some of Mr. Bigelow’s thoughts myself, next week, in Vegas.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!