War Commentary

Still Hope For Iraq

Despite the church bombings this weekend.

Ayatollah al-Sistani has condemned them:

Iraq’s top Shiite Muslim cleric condemned as “hideous crimes” the coordinated bomb attacks on five churches in Baghdad and Mosul that killed at least seven people and marked the insurgency’s first major attacks on Iraq’s minority Christians.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani said in a statement that Sunday’s assaults on churches “targeted Iraq’s unity, stability and independence…”

“…We assert the importance of respecting the rights of Christian civilians and other religious minorities and reaffirm their right to live in their home country Iraq in security and peace.”

It looks like he understands the problem. Amazingly, even Mooky al-Sadr’s guy got into the act:

“This is a cowardly act and targets all Iraqis,” Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, spokesman for radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Al-Jazeera television.

Unfortunately, I’ll bet we won’t be hearing this from the imams across the border in Iran, or from the loony bins that are many of the mosques in Saudi Arabia. This is why Iraq is so fundamental in the war on the fundamentalists.

Space

Who is Jeff Bezos?

Fast Company has an article on Jeff Bezos, famous as the founder of Blue Origin – apparently he’s also been involved in some wacky scheme to sell stuff on the Internet. Who Knew?

Anyway, the article has some of the usual business ‘zine puff piece aspect to it, but it’s fairly in depth, so worth a read if you’d like to get a sense of the man. He comes off fairly well, even allowing for the reporter’s need to be nice in order to maintain access. I’m encouraged that he’ll push Blue Origin towards a successful business model, and he seems willing to spend real money up front before seeing returns, which is probably a necessity in the suborbital launch services industry.

The two really deep pocketed players in the industry are Bezos and Allen. Of the two I suspect that Bezos has the better approach to business (based on little information, unfortunately). The article suggests that his business orientation places a premium on customer service, which I’d always thought was sort of the obvious thing to do until I started paying attention to the way many businesses actually work.

Space

Syntactic metal foams

Here’s an interesting article on syntactic metal foams, with a brief mention of RLV applications. As materials continue to improve SSTO becomes more and more achievable. It’s still not trivial, but it certainly seems within reach for vehicles that aren’t loaded up with pet hobbyhorses like lifting reentry or linear aerospikes.

Political Commentary

Dead Hamster Bounce

Gallup says that the convention cost Kerry support:

In the survey, taken Friday and Saturday, the Democratic ticket of Kerry and John Edwards trailed the Republican ticket of Bush and Dick Cheney 50% to 46% among likely voters, with independent candidate Ralph Nader at 2%.

Before the convention, the two were essentially tied, with Kerry at 47%, Bush at 46%.

The change in support was within the poll’s margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points in the sample of 763 likely voters. But it was nonetheless a stunning result, the first time in the Gallup Poll since the 1972 Democratic convention that a candidate seemed to lose ground at his convention.

That may be because there are some other similarities with the 1972 Democratic convention.

The really bad news is that this was a partial weekend poll, which usually tend to favor Democrats (they seem to be home more for surveying on the weekends than Republicans).

Speaking of hamsters, there’s some pretty phunny photoshopping here. I can’t decide which I like better: “Saving Private Hamster” or the operating room scene with the bunny suit.

Political Commentary

“The Senator Needs You To Move”

Mark Steyn has Senator Kerry pegged:

Kerry now says that Bush “misled” him on Iraq. But, if he was that easily suckered by a renowned moron, how much more susceptible would he be to such wily operators as Chirac. They would speak French to each other, and Jacques would blow soothingly in his ear, and Kerry would look flattered, and there’d be lots of resolutions and joint declarations, and nothing would happen. We’d be fighting the war on terror through the self-admiring inertia of windbag multilateralism.

As for the home front, Kerry says: “As President, I will not evade or equivocate; I will immediately implement the recommendations of that [the 9/11] commission.” Whoa, hold on there. There’s a ton of recommendations, and some of us don’t like the part about concentrating all US intelligence under one cabinet secretary who serves not at the President’s pleasure but for a fixed term. That effectively institutionalises the groupthink resistance to alternative ideas that led to the 9/11 failures. Leadership is about hearing different viewpoints and reaching a judgment. But Kerry gives the impression that, as long as he enjoys the perks of the top job, he’s happy to subcontract his judgment to others.

He moans endlessly about the “outsourcing” of American jobs but, when it comes to his own job, he’s willing to outsource American foreign policy to the mushy transnational talk-shops and to outsource homeland security to some dubious intelligence tsar. There’s no sense of any strategic vision, no sense that he’s thought about Iran or North Korea or any of the other powder kegs about to blow. I tried to ask him about some of these matters during the New Hampshire primary and he intoned in response, “Sometimes truly courageous leadership means having the courage not to show any leadership.” (I quote from memory.)

The whole thing is like that. You know what to do.

Of course, he finished with a flourish:

…After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, “The Senator needs you to move.”

“Well, why couldn’t he have said that?” muttered one of the old coots, as Kerry swept past us.

That’s how I felt after the Convention: all week Senators Biden, Lieberman and Edwards made the case that the Democrats were credible on national security. Why couldn’t Kerry have said that?

Because in the end he’s running for President because he feels he ought to be President. That’s his message to George W Bush: “The Senator needs you to move.” And even then everyone else says it better.

Political Commentary

“The Senator Needs You To Move”

Mark Steyn has Senator Kerry pegged:

Kerry now says that Bush “misled” him on Iraq. But, if he was that easily suckered by a renowned moron, how much more susceptible would he be to such wily operators as Chirac. They would speak French to each other, and Jacques would blow soothingly in his ear, and Kerry would look flattered, and there’d be lots of resolutions and joint declarations, and nothing would happen. We’d be fighting the war on terror through the self-admiring inertia of windbag multilateralism.

As for the home front, Kerry says: “As President, I will not evade or equivocate; I will immediately implement the recommendations of that [the 9/11] commission.” Whoa, hold on there. There’s a ton of recommendations, and some of us don’t like the part about concentrating all US intelligence under one cabinet secretary who serves not at the President’s pleasure but for a fixed term. That effectively institutionalises the groupthink resistance to alternative ideas that led to the 9/11 failures. Leadership is about hearing different viewpoints and reaching a judgment. But Kerry gives the impression that, as long as he enjoys the perks of the top job, he’s happy to subcontract his judgment to others.

He moans endlessly about the “outsourcing” of American jobs but, when it comes to his own job, he’s willing to outsource American foreign policy to the mushy transnational talk-shops and to outsource homeland security to some dubious intelligence tsar. There’s no sense of any strategic vision, no sense that he’s thought about Iran or North Korea or any of the other powder kegs about to blow. I tried to ask him about some of these matters during the New Hampshire primary and he intoned in response, “Sometimes truly courageous leadership means having the courage not to show any leadership.” (I quote from memory.)

The whole thing is like that. You know what to do.

Of course, he finished with a flourish:

…After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, “The Senator needs you to move.”

“Well, why couldn’t he have said that?” muttered one of the old coots, as Kerry swept past us.

That’s how I felt after the Convention: all week Senators Biden, Lieberman and Edwards made the case that the Democrats were credible on national security. Why couldn’t Kerry have said that?

Because in the end he’s running for President because he feels he ought to be President. That’s his message to George W Bush: “The Senator needs you to move.” And even then everyone else says it better.

Political Commentary

“The Senator Needs You To Move”

Mark Steyn has Senator Kerry pegged:

Kerry now says that Bush “misled” him on Iraq. But, if he was that easily suckered by a renowned moron, how much more susceptible would he be to such wily operators as Chirac. They would speak French to each other, and Jacques would blow soothingly in his ear, and Kerry would look flattered, and there’d be lots of resolutions and joint declarations, and nothing would happen. We’d be fighting the war on terror through the self-admiring inertia of windbag multilateralism.

As for the home front, Kerry says: “As President, I will not evade or equivocate; I will immediately implement the recommendations of that [the 9/11] commission.” Whoa, hold on there. There’s a ton of recommendations, and some of us don’t like the part about concentrating all US intelligence under one cabinet secretary who serves not at the President’s pleasure but for a fixed term. That effectively institutionalises the groupthink resistance to alternative ideas that led to the 9/11 failures. Leadership is about hearing different viewpoints and reaching a judgment. But Kerry gives the impression that, as long as he enjoys the perks of the top job, he’s happy to subcontract his judgment to others.

He moans endlessly about the “outsourcing” of American jobs but, when it comes to his own job, he’s willing to outsource American foreign policy to the mushy transnational talk-shops and to outsource homeland security to some dubious intelligence tsar. There’s no sense of any strategic vision, no sense that he’s thought about Iran or North Korea or any of the other powder kegs about to blow. I tried to ask him about some of these matters during the New Hampshire primary and he intoned in response, “Sometimes truly courageous leadership means having the courage not to show any leadership.” (I quote from memory.)

The whole thing is like that. You know what to do.

Of course, he finished with a flourish:

…After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, “The Senator needs you to move.”

“Well, why couldn’t he have said that?” muttered one of the old coots, as Kerry swept past us.

That’s how I felt after the Convention: all week Senators Biden, Lieberman and Edwards made the case that the Democrats were credible on national security. Why couldn’t Kerry have said that?

Because in the end he’s running for President because he feels he ought to be President. That’s his message to George W Bush: “The Senator needs you to move.” And even then everyone else says it better.

Space & Campaign 2004

Fair And Balanced

Keith Cowing has dug up some old pics of the president’s father in a bunny suit, too, from way back in 1981 when he was VP.

See, I run a non-partisan website here.

Kerry’s are still funnier, though.

[Update a few minutes later]

Keith says in comments that he cast a broad net, but that this was the only fish that turned up.

Note to Karl Rove: I think that it might be very effective for the president (in the interest of “changing the tone” and compassionate conservatism) to go down to the cape and have some bunnysuit shots taken of himself (though without the giant hose suppository shot). He could then make a speech honoring all the technicians and others who have to wear those outfits every day, but don’t normally get praised, and to use it (unlike Kerry) as an occasion to actually talk about space policy. It would look classy and be hard for the press to make fun of, while making Kerry’s response to this look even worse.

[Update a minute or so later]

D’oh!

A commenter beat me to the thought (I saw Keith’s comment in email, not by reading the comments).

Once again, it’s nice to have readers smarter than me.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!