Who Woulda Thought?

You’ll all be shocked to learn, as I was, that men aren’t totally averse to seeing women naked:

Women were more frequently bothered by nude sunbathing than men. Just over 40 percent of women said they did not like seeing other naked females on the beach, while just 5 percent of men shared their opinion about nude women.

What would we do without opinion polls?

Corporate Memory Loss

Andy Borowitz has a scoop on the latest NASA screwup:

At the Johnson Space Center, spokesperson Harrison Froling said that NASA scientists were “working overtime” to try to remember why the space agency launched the Explorer 17b on May 17, 1995.

“We are confident that the Explorer 17b will expand our understanding of the solar system and the universe,” Mr. Froling said. “We’re just not sure how.”

Myths Of The Space Age

Over at The Space Review today, Jeff Foust has a more detailed critique of the “Abbey-Lane” Report, a document that I didn’t have a very high opinion of. Also, Craig Carberry has a rundown of the political prospects for NASA and the Vision for Space Exploration in the context of the 2008 elections. He repeats a popular myth, though–a common one:

…it was a Republican president who initiated the new vision, and back in 2000, the Republican platform called for

Poverty Causes Terrorism

That’s one of the bedrock assumptions of the left, or at least so they tell us. And it must be true, right, because after all:

LORD STEVENS, the former Metropolitan police chief who retired earlier this year, said last night that the London bombings were almost certainly masterminded by British-born terrorists.

He said last week

Unknown Unknown

Mark Steyn says that Britain doesn’t even seem to understand how big a problem it’s got:

The choice for Britons now is whether they wish to be Australians post-Bali or Spaniards post-Madrid. That shouldn’t be a tough call. But it’s easy to stand before a news camera and sonorously declare that “the British people will never surrender to terrorism.” In reality, unless it’s clear a threat is primal, most democratic peoples and their political leaders prefer to regard bad news as a peripheral nuisance which can be negotiated away to the fringe of their concerns.

That’s what Britain thought in the 1930s — back when Hitler was slavering over Czechoslovakia, and Neville Chamberlain dismissed it as “a faraway country of which we know little.” Today, the faraway country of which the British know little is Britain itself. Traditional terrorists — the IRA, the Basque separatists — operate close to home. Islamism projects itself long-range to any point of the planet with an ease most G-8 militaries can’t manage. Small cells operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society while the political class seems all but unaware of their existence.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!