Death Of A Man Of Peace

“I have been to the mountain top. I have a dream.”

“I have a dream of a Palestine from the west bank of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

“I have a dream of blood-sucking Zionists–men, women, babies–in their ice cream parlors, sundered and bleeding by metal fasteners soaked in rat poison, dead or writhing in agony now and for years.”

“I have a dream of a Middle East without Jews, in which Arabs can mingle with Islamicists, and oppress unbelievers and women, without being offended or defiled by the oppressive Jewish race.”

“I have a dream, of a future in which people will be judged not by the content of their character, but by their religion and ethnicity. I have seen the promised land.”

Yes, we all remember how the Reverend Martin Luther King sent out children with bombs strapped surreptiously to their bellies to deliberately murder innocents, in order to seek a better life for his people.

Tolerance

Mark Steyn says that our supposed betters in Europe have it backwards:

In 2002 and 2003, I took a couple of two-legged, mini fact-finding trips – first to western Europe, then on to the Middle East. And both times I was struck by the way the Muslims of Araby were far less inflamed than those in the alienated immigrant ghettoes around Paris and Amsterdam. Life in the West, exposure to the self-loathing platitudes of Anglican clerics, these are the sort of things that seem to inflame Muslims. Many of the wackiest Islamists from Richard Reid to Zacarias Moussaoui to Metin Kaplan are products of the enervated Europe symbolised by the Rev Mark Beach…

…[The Islamists’] most effective guerrillas aren’t in the Hindu Kush, where it is the work of moments to drop a daisycutter on the mighty Pashtun warrior. They’re travelling light on the bridle-paths of Europe – the small cells that operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society, while politicians cling to the beaten tracks – old ideas, multicultural pieties and a general hope that things will turn out for the best.

Lies, Damned Lies, And Aerospace Cost Estimates

Dwayne Day has a long, but worthwhile description of how bad the reporting has been on the president’s space initiative, and the source of the mythical trillion dollar program.

Jeff Foust has a related piece on how badly the administration and particularly NASA has handled the media, with the danger that this president’s space initiative may share the fate of his father’s.

I remain very concerned about this program, because I think that the approach is fundamentally technically flawed. If Dennis Wingo is right, they’ve narrowed down the trade space far too much too early, by looking at a binary decision between building at ISS with EELVs (a bad idea for two reasons–ISS and EELV) or building a heavy lifter and replicating Apollo. Either approach will result in a program that’s ultimately unsustainable, if it succeeds at all.

There are other options, but it requires new thinking that NASA is clearly not yet ready for. I think that the president’s initiative would have a much better chance if he had set up a clean new agency, rather than giving it to the existing NASA, just as we did when NASA was established forty six years ago. It’s not clear that Code T as such will be able to break out of NASA think as long as it’s a code within the agency, rather than one that’s independent.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!