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Epstein’s Tap Dance
Richard Epstein weighs in on the wiretap issue on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal with Executive Power on Steroids. While claiming to be for legal wiretaps, he is strongly against illegal ones:
The major danger with presidential surveillance does not lie in this particular overreaching of executive power. It’s what comes next. If President Bush can ignore FISA, then he can disregard a congressional prohibition against the use of nuclear force.
Perhaps too melodramatic to be convincing. When I did Oxford debate in high school, every plan from water quality to farm policy ended with nuclear war. But there are myriad ways that presidential powers could become tyrannical if a Jacksonian president took the law into his own hands. I may not like Jackson as chief magistrate, but he sure knew how to give a good speech.
Epstein’s Tap Dance
Richard Epstein weighs in on the wiretap issue on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal with Executive Power on Steroids. While claiming to be for legal wiretaps, he is strongly against illegal ones:
The major danger with presidential surveillance does not lie in this particular overreaching of executive power. It’s what comes next. If President Bush can ignore FISA, then he can disregard a congressional prohibition against the use of nuclear force.
Perhaps too melodramatic to be convincing. When I did Oxford debate in high school, every plan from water quality to farm policy ended with nuclear war. But there are myriad ways that presidential powers could become tyrannical if a Jacksonian president took the law into his own hands. I may not like Jackson as chief magistrate, but he sure knew how to give a good speech.
Epstein’s Tap Dance
Richard Epstein weighs in on the wiretap issue on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal with Executive Power on Steroids. While claiming to be for legal wiretaps, he is strongly against illegal ones:
The major danger with presidential surveillance does not lie in this particular overreaching of executive power. It’s what comes next. If President Bush can ignore FISA, then he can disregard a congressional prohibition against the use of nuclear force.
Perhaps too melodramatic to be convincing. When I did Oxford debate in high school, every plan from water quality to farm policy ended with nuclear war. But there are myriad ways that presidential powers could become tyrannical if a Jacksonian president took the law into his own hands. I may not like Jackson as chief magistrate, but he sure knew how to give a good speech.
All The News Not Fit To Print
An Iraqi mayor gives thanks to America and its troops:
Our city was the main base of operations for Abu Mousab Al Zarqawi. The city was completely held hostage in the hands of his henchmen. Our schools, governmental services, businesses and offices were closed. Our streets were silent, and no one dared to walk them. Our people were barricaded in their homes out of fear; death awaited them around every corner. Terrorists occupied and controlled the only hospital in the city. Their savagery reached such a level that they stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young. This was the situation of our city until God prepared and delivered unto them the courageous soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, who liberated this city, ridding it of Zarqawi
A Precious Quote
From Henry Spencer, over at sci.space.policy:
As various people have pointed out in the past, to judge by the fuss that gets made when a few of them die, astronauts clearly are priceless national assets — exactly the sort of people you should not be risking in an experimental-class vehicle.
Life In The Twenty-First Century
Using nanotube structures, the LEES invention promises a significant increase on the storage capacity of existing commercial ultracapacitors by storing electrical fields at an atomic level. The new LEES ultracapacitors could replace the conventional battery in everything from the smallest MP3 players through to electric automobiles and beyond, yielding batteries with a lifetime equivalent to the product they power and recharging times inside a minute. Most significantly, they promise a much smaller and lighter
$1 Billion/year in Twenty Years
I tracked down the cite to the following quote in The Economic Impact of Commercial Space Transportation on the US Economy: 2004.
Recent market studies have shown public space travel has the potential to become a billion dollar industry within 20 years.
It’s the famous 2002 Futron study made public in October 2004. On the bullish side, still no accounting for games. No accounting for $200,000 starting prices (It assumes $100,000) which is bullish for price, bearish for quantity. On the bearish side, still none of the demand flown off. Why am I analyzing 4 year old data when I could be testing the market personally for a little more than the cost of a new study?
Down The Memory Hole
Gaaahhhh…
They’ve changed the story. Note same link as before, but all references to Wilson and the 2003 SOTU have been deleted, just as I feared they would (thanks to emailer Abigail Brayden). Guess that story never even happened.
And of all the bad luck, I’d been keeping the original one open in a window, just in case they did this. But I had a computer freezeup this morning, had to reboot (thanks, Microsoft!) and I hadn’t captured a screenshot.
But as the Abigail points out, what they did was redirect the original link to the new story. The old one is still there, with a new URL.
Interesting. Here’s something else interesting. The Deseret News has a version of the story from Friday in which the wording has been changed to make it more accurate. It now reads:
Wilson’s revelations cast doubt on President Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to develop a nuclear bomb and had sought to buy uranium in Africa as one of the administration’s key justifications for going to war in Iraq.
I wonder who edited that one, and if it was in response to blogospheric complaints? And, of course, still no response from AP to my email.
A Real Paper Rocket
A lot of people disparage newcomers to the space field as having “paper rockets.”
Well, at little cost, you can now make your own paper Saturn V. And here’s another company that’s going to be offering a paper MLP and crawler. The pictures are pretty amazing, considering the construction materials.