While I continue to do thought gathering (and getting ready to move, while starting a new job doing technology evaluation for the Jupiter Icy Moons project), Clark Lindsey has his usual comprehensive report on this past weekend’s Space Access Conference. Now that he’s done the heavy lifting, I’ll try to fill in any gaps from what I can recall, hopefully tomorrow.
At first reading, the only slight deficit I see is inadequate coverage of Jim Muncy’s talk on the new commercial space transportation legislation, which had a number of key items worth repeating, and of which I’d been previously unaware. Hopefully I’ll rectify that manana, though if Clark has good notes, he’s obviously welcome to flesh out his already excellent report with those details.
The scale of the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme is way beyond any of the corporate scandals that so excite the progressive mind. Oil-for-Food was designed to let the Iraqi government sell a limited amount of oil in return for food and other necessities for its people. Between 1996 and 2003, Saddam did more than $100 billion of business, all of it approved by Kofi Annan’s Secretariat.
In return, by their own official figures, $15 billion of food and health supplies was sent to Iraq. What proportion of this reached the sick and malnourished Iraqi children is anybody’s guess. Coalition troops discovered stockpiles of UN food far from starving moppets. But let us assume there is an innocent explanation. Even so, by the UN’s own account, Oil-for-Food seemed to involve an awful lot of oil for not much food.
So where’s the media that couldn’t get enough of the Enron scandal?
I just got an email alert from the Airline Pilot’s Security Alliance:
…Washington, DC – Today the Airline Pilots’ Security Alliance (APSA) alerted its members around the country to Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter’s (R-PA) opposition to the arming of America
Remember that Claremont psych professor who vandalized her own car, and then claimed that it was done by racists? She’s been charged with filing a false police report, and insurance fraud.
Somehow, I suspect that she won’t be on the tenure track:
Claremont President Pamela Gann has said the college would conduct its own investigation before deciding whether to retain Dunn, whose contract expires later this year.
I’m sure that she didn’t lie–she was just providing an alternative narrative. This loon might make an interesting case study for one of her classes. I wonder how many deluded students she’ll be able to continue to rally to her defense?
Based on his trip to Phoenix this past weekend, Alan Boyle lays out a potentially interesting schedule for private manned spaceflight activities in the coming months. I’m still gathering my own thoughts on the conference.
I’ve always been fascinated by how quickly the flora can change in just a short distance. Driving to Phoenix from LA on Thursday, I shot this picture of a saguaro–the first one I saw on the trip (forgive the quality–I shot it from a moving car, and cropped it from a much larger photo). It was just a few miles east of the California/Arizona border (and accordingly just a few miles east of the Colorado River). I’ve never seen a saguaro in California–they seem to know where the state border is, at least at this latitude.
This is the transition region from the desolate Colorado Desert (the low desert south of the Mojave that encompasses much of non-coastal non-mountainous southern California) and the beautiful and cactus-filled Sonoran Desert, of which the saguaro cactus is emblematic. It doesn’t seem to be the river itself that demarks it–you don’t see the cactus until you start to climb up into the hills just east of it, out of Blythe. Apparently it’s a combination of longitude and altitude, though as you get farther east and south, toward Tucson where the national monuments are, the suitable altitude can vary considerably.
I’m still going to post on the conference itself, but this is the only picture that came out well, other than one of Jim Muncy. I didn’t have enough light from the distance I was at with my little two megapixel Nikon.
