Al Sharpton has entered the presidential race.

This should be fun.

If people who run a regime like this cannot be called evil, then no one can.

Which is, of course, the goal of many of our “allies.” It’s gruesome reading, and bear in mind, while reading it, that the organizers of Saturday’s “peace” marches support this regime.

T. L. James has a thoughtful post on the space program as the outcome of a mass movement.

Jay Manifold has a post on nanotech and its implications for space, and vice versa.

Jay Manifold has a post on nanotech and its implications for space, and vice versa.

Jay Manifold has a post on nanotech and its implications for space, and vice versa.

The White House has pointed out that, in attempting to persuade the world that we shouldn’t go after Saddam, France has essentially admitted that he has WMD programs.

Also,

In a backhanded slap at France, Fleischer also said the president wasn’t terribly surprised that some countries are advocating going easy on Iraq. Fleischer said the president has often viewed his own role as one of “putting spine” into the U.N. and the international community.

Boy, for all of supposedly being the people who invented diplomacy, the Frogs are sure off their game. And being outsmarted by a retarded cowboy, too. That’s gotta hurt.

Derek Lowe has an interesting post about bacteria that may hold the key to long-duration space travel. Unfortunately, it won’t be of much use to any of us, other than Bacterium-Americans…

But what about keeping spares around in a spare nucleus – a sort of “break glass in case of emergency” DNA vault? That would require biological engineering beyond our current capabilities, but if and when we get there, I can think of a good use for such an organism. For some years now, Freeman Dyson (yep, him again) has been advocating what he’s called an “astrochicken” space probe. That’s a part-living device that is hardened to survive in vacuum, use solar power, furnish its own propulsion, obtain its fuel from local sources, and so on. A satellite that needs to eat, in other words. (You can find one description of such a device in his book Infinite in All Directions)

I think he’s got a very good point, and that biotechnology might well turn out to be a key for space exploration. What better way to package such an organism’s DNA than to follow the durable example of Deinococcus radiodurans?

Mathematician John Allen Paulos (author of Innumeracy) has the numbers that show why Total Information Awareness won’t work, and will have a tremendous cost in both money and freedom.

…the system will arrest almost 3 million innocent people, about 3,000 times the number of guilty ones. And that occurs, remember, only because we’re assuming the system has these amazing powers of discernment. If its powers are anything like our present miserable predictive capacities, an even greater percentage of those arrested will be innocent.

Andrew Stuttaford points out that despite the popular perception, there’s very little about Arianna Huffington that could be properly labeled “conservative.” I don’t know if there’s this perception of her as right wing because of her history (a bizarre one, in which she was married to a rich Republican liberal who almost beat Diane Feinstein in her first Senatorial election, and then divorced him after he came out of the closet about his sexual preference for men), that’s simply hanging on from inertia, or what.

One possibility is that the press likes to have liberals who they can label as conservative, so that when the supposed “conservative” opposes some Republican position, they can say, “Gee, this must really be an egregiously neanderthal policy if even the conservative Arianna Huffington is against it…”

I was thinking about this the other day while listening to a radio program on KCRW (the LA NPR affiliate) called “Left, Right and Center.” It’s hosted by Matt Miller (former Clinton budget guy), with Arianna and Robert Scheer. I guess the idea was that Scheer was left (no question about that), Huffington was “right,” and that Mr. Miller represented the center. It was always kind of laughable, but today it just seems ridiculously so.

In fact, to demonstrate how sinister-tilted they all are, they had David Frum on to defend the Administration’s policy on affirmative action in general and the Michigan case in particular. All three sides of the supposed political spectrum proceeded to gang up on both him and the Administration (though Miller at least was willing to acknowledge that the Administration might have some merit in some of its arguments).

The show’s title should be “Left, Lefter and Loony.” But then, it’s NPR, where they have both kinds of politics–liberal and progressive.

[Update on Tuesday morning]

N. Z. Bear informs me that I’m behind the times–Frum is now a regular, and that he is the right. OK, that still begs the question, what the heck is Arianna?