War Commentary

“Brought Up To Hate”

An Egyptian muslim describes her culture:

Is it any surprise that after decades of indoctrination in a culture of hate, that people actually do hate? Arab society has created a system of relying on fear of a common enemy. It’s a system that has brought them much-needed unity, cohesion and compliance in a region ravaged by tribal feuds, instability, violence, and selfish corruption. So Arab leaders blame Jews and Christians rather than provide good schools, roads, hospitals, housing, jobs, or hope to their people.

For 30 years I lived inside this war zone of oppressive dictatorships and police states. Citizens competed to appease and glorify their dictators, but they looked the other way when Muslims tortured and terrorised other Muslims. I witnessed honour killings of girls, oppression of women, female genital mutilation, polygamy and its devastating effect on family relations. All of this is destroying the Muslim faith from within.

There isn’t going to be a pretty end to this.

War Commentary

“Brought Up To Hate”

An Egyptian muslim describes her culture:

Is it any surprise that after decades of indoctrination in a culture of hate, that people actually do hate? Arab society has created a system of relying on fear of a common enemy. It’s a system that has brought them much-needed unity, cohesion and compliance in a region ravaged by tribal feuds, instability, violence, and selfish corruption. So Arab leaders blame Jews and Christians rather than provide good schools, roads, hospitals, housing, jobs, or hope to their people.

For 30 years I lived inside this war zone of oppressive dictatorships and police states. Citizens competed to appease and glorify their dictators, but they looked the other way when Muslims tortured and terrorised other Muslims. I witnessed honour killings of girls, oppression of women, female genital mutilation, polygamy and its devastating effect on family relations. All of this is destroying the Muslim faith from within.

There isn’t going to be a pretty end to this.

War Commentary

The Inevitable March Continues

Wretchard says that diplomacy won’t prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Not that this is news, but it’s useful to continue to point out to the naifs who fantasize otherwise.

This is probably the largest global crisis we’ve faced since the Cold War, and possibly since 1938, though it wasn’t recognized as that serious a crisis at the time. We will either have to accept the reality of a nuclear Iran (and a nuclear Iran run by mullahs, not by the Iranian people) or a war with Iran to prevent that, at whatever the cost. Neither option has a low cost, but at some point, I hope that the nation will recognize that the cost of the latter will be lower.

I’ve lived through most of the Cold War, when we grew up thinking that our nuclear incineration was almost inevitable, with duck and cover drills in elementary school, but in many ways, I fear the future now more than I have at any previous time in my life of half a century.

We are in for ugly times, not long from now, and the best we can hope for at this point is to minimize the horror, because we’ve allowed a new totalitarianism to grow, unhampered, for too long. Let us just hope that we can act sooner than Chamberlain did.

Media Criticism

No Response From AP

Yesterday, after noting the false reporting on the president’s 2003 SOTU address, I attempted to contact the reporter directly. Unfortunately, AP doesn’t make this very easy to do. If you go their contact page, it just says that for any queries to correspondents, to send an email to info@ap.org. I should also note that the reporter is not listed under any of the categories I checked (national reporting, news features, or regional reporters). (S)he may be a freelancer.

So anyway, I sent the following email to that address:

In this AP story (link from Yahoo), the reporter writes:

“Wilson’s revelations cast doubt on President Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration’s key justifications for going to war in Iraq.”

Wilson’s “revelations” (read, in large part, proven lies) couldn’t have done this, because, the president did not make such a claim. Go back and read the address.

He said that the British government had learned that Saddam had *attempted* to purchase uranium from *Africa*. He didn’t say that the attempt had succeeded, and there was no mention of Niger (Africa is a very big continent). This is an ongoing media myth that AP has a responsibility to quash, not promulgate.

It’s about twenty-four hours later, and I’ve not even received an acknowledgment of the email, let alone a substantive response. Down the memory hole, I guess.

I note the irony of the large-font words on the contact page: “We Welcome Your Feedback.” I guess they do, as long as we understand that it’s apparently the information equivalent of sending it into a black hole.

Space

His Own Petard

As NASA continues to chop everything in its budget other than the least cost-effective things–Shuttle, ISS and ESAS–Lou Friedman of the Planetary Society is starting to whine about the loss of space science. But Clark Lindsey points out the irony:

[Dr. Griffin’s plan to delay planetary science programs] would make perfect sense if the CEV program promised to significantly lower the cost of space access and of its utilization. Lower transport costs would make all of those science projects much cheaper to build and operate and would allow for many more science missions than can be flown now.

However, as has been argued often here and in many other sites, flying capsules on Shuttle derived expendables and building a hugely expensive and seldom launched heavy lifter just isn’t going to lower the cost of space very much over what it is now. While halting the Shuttle program now would help to fund a handful of space science missions, it would not help overcome the long term limitations to space exploration and development caused by the extremely high costs of getting to space…

…I’ll note that much of the basic CEV architecture using Shuttle components was born via a Planetary Society sponsored study (pdf) by Griffin and several collaborators before he came to NASA.

Space

Idiot Bureaucrat Defeat

Clark Lindsey has some good news on the model rocketry front–a legal victory over ATFE (a situation about which I’ve written previously). I love this quote from the ruling judge:

The problem in this case is that ATFE’s explanation for its determination that APCP deflagrates lacks any coherence. We therefore owe no deference to ATFE’s purported expertise because we cannot discern it. ATFE has neither laid out a concrete standard for classifying materials along the burn-deflagrate-detonate continuum, nor offered data specific to the burn speed of APCP when used for its ‘common or primary purpose.’ On this record, the agency’s decision cannot withstand judicial review.

Political Commentary

Snuck It Under The Radar

I get very irritated when people, even intelligent people, who I respect greatly, use the phrases “tax cuts” and “tax-rate cuts” interchangeably, and one of the things that I’d do if I were King would be to outlaw this.

But because so many are unfamiliar with the difference, the administration has managed to pull a fast one on the Beltway. They are going to require an analysis of tax proposals by scoring them dynamically, rather than (absurdly) they’ve done in the past, statically. What does this mean?

In the past, any time the CBO or GAO did an analysis of a proposed change in tax rate changes, they assumed that said rate changes would have no effect on the growth rate of the economy, either in the general economy, or in the specific economic sphere in which the tax change would take place. Anyone familiar with economics knows that such an assumption is…to put it gently…nonsense.

We can’t necessarily know what the effect of a tax rate change will be on an economic sector, but to assume that it will be nil is ridiculous.

So, people who are “scoring” (that is, attempting to estimate what the revenue effects of a proposed tax change will be) will now have a more difficult job–they will have to attempt to estimate what the effect of the tax change will be on the affected economic sectors when coming up with their estimate of revenue change for the federal government.

Will they get it right? Who knows. But at least now, they’ll have to make the attempt, instead of absurdly assuming that the effect is zero. It will also provide one more thing to argue about when we attempt to reduce tax rates, but since it will also have that effect on attempts to increase them, that’s a wash, in my opinion. At least it will force a debate on the subject, and make it a respectable topic of discussion.

Media Criticism

The Big Lie Continues

AP continues to promulgate the myth:

Wilson’s revelations cast doubt on President Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration’s key justifications for going to war in Iraq.

Of course, it wasn’t possible for Joe Wilson to cast doubt on such a claim, because President Bush never made such a claim, in the SOTU or elsewhere, but that never seems to stop these people. Why do they continue to think they can get away with this, when anyone can go read that speech?

We’ve been over this many times, but apparently, it’s necessary to do so again. Here are the sixteen words:

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

That’s it. It doesn’t say that uranium was sold to Iraq, it doesn’t say Niger. It says that the British government has learned about attempts to purchase uranium from Africa. Africa is a big place. Nowhere in the speech does it claim that the attempts were successful, and nowhere in the speech is Niger mentioned. The sentence, as written in the AP story, is completely false, but many persist in believing it, because apparently it confirms their prejudices. In their minds, it’s “fake but accurate.”

We need to call out Ms. Locy and her editor on this.

As to the story about Libby testifying that Cheney told him to release classified info, I’ll wait for some actual facts to come out, rather than rumors from unnamed sources.

[Update in the afternoon]

Powerline says that the story about Libby leaks of classified info is much ado about not much:

The NIE has been declassified since the summer of 2003, and we have quoted from it many times since then. These proceedings from the House of Representatives show that the NIE had been declassified no later than July 21, 2003. So it’s not exactly a mystery whether “that happened in this instance.” There are only two alternatives here: either AP reporters are too lazy to spend 30 seconds on Google to educate themselves as to what happened during the ancient history of 2003, or they write articles that are deliberately misleading.

Or outright false, as demonstrated above.

[Saturday morning update]

I’ve still received no response from the AP on this matter.

[Monday update]

They’ve redirected that URL to a new version of the story, absent the misstatements.

Space

AST Conference Blogging

Unfortunately, I haven’t been to the FAA Commercial Space Transportation conference (held every February) in a few years. The years that I have the time, I don’t have the money, and the years that I have the money, I can’t find the time (the latter, which was the case this year, is a better situation). Funny how that works.

Anyway, while I didn’t go, Clark Lindsey did, and he’s got a report from yesterday’s festivities.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!